Blogs

CiviCRM 1.4: A Free and Open Source eCRM Solution

We are pleased to announce the latest release of CiviCRM - version 1.4.

Special thanks to the dedicated folks who contributed to this release by testing the beta revisions - and to everyone in the community who provided new ideas, feedback(especially critical feedback), and patches.

CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

New to CiviCRM? Read more...

What's new in 1.4? Offer Premiums (thank-you gifts) to online and offline contributors CiviMail - an optional email broadcast component - includes integrated subscribe/unsubscribe, bounce handling, open and click-thru tracking...

... A big ++ to the folks at CivicActions who contributed enormously to getting CiviMail "production-ready".

CiviNode is a module and API that exposes CiviCRM contacts, groups, and other CiviCRM object types to Drupal as nodes. It's designed to make CiviCRM easier to use and integrate with all of the Drupal tools and techniques you've come to know and love. For example, once you've mirrored a CiviCRM contact into Drupal, you will be able to:

* Catagorize it with taxonomies * Attach event or location information * Track what's happening with the contact with a work-flow * Control the way it displays by theming it.

CiviNode Module

Why to go Rob (Torenware Networks)!!

CivicSpace has announced the ALPHA of their hosted service. This includes CiviCRM 1.3. Please consider helping them out by signing up to be an alpha tester.

CiviCRM is getting a fair amount of acceptance internationally. You can read a one pager of case studies and other information.

http://objectledge.org/confluence/pages/viewpageattachments.action?pageId=7185

Drupal provides a very strong taxonomy system to classify content. Contacts could benefit from that taxonomy functionality.

You can see Eric Mckenna's cookbook here: http://objectledge.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+Drupal+Taxonomy+Integration

Nick Lewis has blogged some good basics on CiviCRM & Drupal users:

"In this tutorial, I will explain how to get a user’s country from CiviCRM, and auto-generate a taxonomy term within the context of the user posting a new content item." ( read more... )

See Mike Gifford's annotated Flickr screenshot of the vcard functionality in CiviCRM... http://www.flickr.com/photos/mgifford/70585008/

Axel Rüweler has completed an initial German translation of OpenNGO using our translation tool at http://translations.openngo.org/.

Special thanks to Axel for dedicating the time to complete the translation.

The Mozilla Foundation, the folks behind Firefox and Thunderbird, have announced the Mozilla Corporation, a for-profit corporate subsidiary wholley owned by the 501-c-3 nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. http://www.mozilla.org/reorganization/

This precisely mirrors the structure we have choosen to support CiviCRM and OpenNGO. The Social Source Foundation, a 501-c-3 nonprofit, shepards the open source software along, creates code, builds community and generally tries to create a healthy ecosystem. We also have a wholly-owned for profit subsidiary that will offer an ASP version of our software at a small monthly fee (approximately $50 per month).

CiviCRM 1.0 Beta has been released in Polish and English. We have a bunch of other translations that have been started on our translation server. Current translations in progress include: Spanish (Español) Thai ( ไทย), Khmer Brasilian Portuguese (Português) Polish took about 24 person-hours to do the translation, so we expect each language would require a similar level of effort. Khmer and Thai are particularly exciting since they demonstrate that we can support non-roman alphabets. The next step is to support non-left-to-right languages like Arabic and Japanese.