Blogs

Keep up-to-date with blogs from the core team, working groups, developers, users and champions worldwide. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive regular updates by email. We also have an RSS feed.
August 17, 2010
By michaelmcandrew Filed under Architecture

Tokens are used in CiviCRM to create mail merges in much the same way as, for example, Microsoft Office. They are currently implemented in (at least) four places in CIviCRM: 'CiviMail', 'Send Mail to Contacts', 'Create PDF Letter' and 'Create Mailing Labels'. Out of the box Civi comes with a decent set of tokens, including tokens for all the address fields. One thing it doesn't do is provide a token that correctly formats an address block taking account of when fields aren't present. For example, if i used the following address tokens for my address:

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August 14, 2010
By xavier Filed under CiviCRM
Hi all, We probably all have the same problem: the same contact is present several times in our CRM.
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August 11, 2010
By michalFiled under

We just released CiviCRM 3.2.1 - it is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site.

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August 10, 2010
By jbertolacci Filed under CiviMember, Architecture

Being able to efficiently identify and merge duplicate contacts and related data is be an important -- and often time-consuming -- task for organizations getting data from multiple sources. The current CiviCRM dedupe and merge process does not scale well beyond a moderate number of contacts and consequently there has been dicussion on the forums and IRC about optimizing the dedupe and merge code in CiviCRM.

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July 29, 2010
By lcdweb Filed under CiviCase

I've been working through case configuration with a few clients over the last several months and have run into a few areas where I think the functionality could be improved. The core team asked that I outline it for the community to see if other groups experience similar workflows and would benefit from these changes.

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July 28, 2010
By michalFiled under

Finally, the time has come. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, here is CiviCRM version 3.2.0, stable - it is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site.

This release includes several major new features/highlights: Usability improvements - Better looking and more intuitive Contact Summary Page. The new "Actions" button provides 1-click access to most contact-related forms. New clean and consistent icons have been implemented to provide helpful visual cues. You can now get a configurable contact summary pop-up from search results by mousing over the contact icon on any row. We'll be blogging with more details on these usability features during the release cycle. Support for PHP 5.3 -This release supports PHP 5.3. CiviCase Phase 3 - Thanks to the Physicians Health Program folks for pushing CiviCase to the next level! You can check out the phase 3 enhancements here. CiviEvent workflow improvements - Streamlining the workflow for events, providing 1-click access to event related screens from the configuration panel, and generating event name badges. For more details check CRM-6230 and CRM-6294. Free-tagging, and Tags for Cases and Activities - You can add one or more free-tagging "taxonomies" - called Tagsets - for use with contacts, cases and / or activities. You can also specify which tags can be used for which types of records. Standalone version dropped - Please note that we are dropping support for the Standalone version in 3.2. We recommend that current standalone users convert their installations to run under a basic Drupal install during this release cycle. ... and lots of other improvements. Check out the complete listing of new features, improvements and bug fixes on the issue tracker.

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July 28, 2010
By Eileen Filed under CiviPledge, CiviCRM, Drupal

When working in setting up and developing websites (among other things) we often have to choose between getting stuck in and getting stuff done the known way or trying to invest time in coming up with a more automated way or efficient way of doing things. Usually at some point we become aware of whether we made the right choice – and I find that moment is normally accompanied by a certain sinking feeling.

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July 23, 2010
By Dave Greenberg Filed under Meetups
We had a lively meetup on Tuesday at Wikimedia Foundation HQ in San Francisco. There was pretty cool mix of organizations represented: board member and director from a "start-up" independent middle school looking to use CiviCRM and Drupal to support their vision of student - teacher - administration - parent collaboration IT folks from an association of psychoanalysts - looking to implement CiviCRM and Drupal for fund-raising and events two new developers from Wikimedia Foundation - looking towards making CiviCRM a more effective tool for their users The focus of the meeting was review and Q/A on the upcoming 3.2 release. I walked through a slideshow of highlights - and we took frequent detours to my sandbox to dig deeper into features when folks had questions. I've been thinking that we've taken some big steps in usability and "polish" in 3.2 - and the reactions during the meetup reinforced this.
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July 23, 2010
By Anonymous Filed under Meetups

Were you thinking of attending the Mumbai CiviCRM Meet up  - July 2010  last Thursday in India  or wondering what exactly is shared, discussed, explained, who attended ?…

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July 22, 2010
By deepak.srivastava Filed under Architecture, Drupal, Schools
A school needed an online admission application process to be developed and integrated with CiviSchool. The application form is a different workflow from the online family forms. Web Access helped convert this idea to working application as part of the CiviSchool Project. I have been working with Web Access on this project and we have completed most of it. Now seemed to be a good time to let everyone know about what we have done so far. Here is how the admission workflow is - Parent account setup : A parent goes to the school site and uses a civicrm registration profile to create an account and enters the site. The account automatically gets assigned a "Applicant Parent" subtype. Filling admission application forms : From the dashboard parent fills admission application forms for an applicant (child). Parent can apply for 1 or more applicants. All applicants are assigned a "Applicant" subtype. Submitting a payment : Depending on whether financial aid is taken or not, parent submits a payment for an applicant. The payment is done via contribution page with contribution type - "Application Fee". Since parent is the one making the payment, to keep track of which applicant the payment is being done for, an extra argument is passed to the payment/contribution url. We using a hook to make all the checks and link the payment to the applicant. Scheduling appointments : Once the application is complete and payment is made (if needed), parent can schedule a child visit or a parent interview. A school tour could be booked at any stage of the process.
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