Blogs

Today was the second (and, unfortunately, last) day of the SF CiviCamp.

The day started with Rob Thorne’s presentation on using CiviCRM 1.x contacts as CCK fields and his work on CiviNode. Given that in the meantime all of CiviCRM, CCK and Views released version 2s, the outcome of the discussion was that it’s best to rewrite this code from scratch.

CiviCamp day1 started with good number of participants with a total count of 14. We started with introduction and complaints about civicrm. Most of the complaints were about APIs, upgrades and support of previous versions. Discussions on APIs are scheduled for day2. Regarding upgrades it looked that older version (1.9 or below) generally have problems with upgrades since it requires some technical expertise.

Day 1

CiviCRM team members had the opportunity to attend the BADCamp Oct. (11/12) held in University of California, Berkley. We decided to sit through the lectures of our respective interests.

I'm happy to announce that we've finally gotten our act together and configured a complete public demo for the Joomla! version of CiviCRM 2.1. Joomla! users and integrators will finally be able to try out CiviCRM for Joomla! without going through the process of setting up their own site. We think this will be a good step forward in strengthening the Joomla! part of the CiviCRM community. The front-end demo site includes links to test-drive public-facing features: online contribution page membership signup page event info and registration page

Hi,

On every new CiviCRM install, I've had the same question about the difference between CiviCRM (the mass mailing module) and the send mail feature (from and individual contact and a search result). The question is when to use one or the other.

I understand than historically, these two features comes from both end of the spectrum, CiviCRM was made to send newsletters and bulk emails, and the send email is a replacement of sending a mail from your mail client. However, you can have a mailing list of a handful of contacts, and you can send "individual" emails to several dozen contacts.

After more than 7 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 2.1 Stable. You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our public demo site. 2.1 features a number of exciting new features, including... Joomla! 1.5 and Drupal 6 compatibility (CiviCRM 2.1 is NOT compatible with Drupal 5.x or Joomla! 1.0.x) Production-ready "standalone" version of CiviCRM (with thanks to U.S. PIRG) Contribution Pledges (back-office and self-service) Multi-language / single site support (with thanks to Google Summer of Code and the Joomla! team) Nesting (hierarchy) for groups (with thanks to U.S. PIRG) Contribution, participant and membership export improvements (with thanks to American Friends Service Committee) CiviCRM Home / Dashboard customization (with thanks to Frontline Defenders) Several usabiilty improvements including basic and quick search improvements (with thanks to CivicActions), and elimination of the annoying page reloads when entering contributions, memberships, and event registrations. FCKEdit and TinyMCE rich text editors Early-bird (date-based) discounts for events Multi-participant event registration Dedupe design and scalability improvements New tools for developers to extend and customize CiviCRM - including form hooks, adding PHP to custom fields, REST support for selected APIs, DB-driven menus and more. .... and 200+ more smaller improvements and bug fixes You can find Release Highlights here, and check out the resolved issues listing for details on the 570+ improvements and bug fixes. A big round of applause is due to all the folks who downloaded, tested and submitted bug reports during the 2.1 release cycle. The alpha and beta packages were downloaded more than 4,000 times . 250+ bugs and "improvements" were reported by community members and fixed by the team during the release cycle. A special shout-out goes to some of the "heroes" who made significant contributions through both design and testing of this release - Mark Burdett, Chris Burgess, Matt Chapman, Peter Davis, Father Shawn (Duncan), Xavier Dutoit, Tony Guzman, Dave Hansen-Lange, Eileen McNaughton, Wes Morgan, Chris Mott, Brian Shaughnessy, Cynthia Tarascio, Elin Waring. This is another huge increase improvement in community participation in bullet-proofing a release - and should help make this our highest quality release yet.

We have 4 more slots available for CiviCamp. CiviCamp will be held at Yahoo!'s San francisco offices (downtown, Sansome street, close to BART/Muni etc).

The CiviCamp agenda is on our wiki here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCamp+-+Oct+13-14%2C+2008. Some other details of the camp in prior blog posts