For the past 20 years, CiviCRM has been about human connection: engaging with your constituents in meaningful ways. Every contact in your database represents a real person with a genuine connection to your organization.
Doesn't that sound quaint and old fashioned?
If you're a developer of any CiviCRM extensions or customizations, read on... (otherwise, hi, CiviCRM just got a bit more efficient! Now you can move on with your day. Thanks for stopping by).
Gee, it seems like everyone is rebranding these days. Companies big and small are getting new names, new looks, new logos and new mascots. We at CiviCRM have thought long and hard about this phenomenon, in fact, for the past few months we've put all of our nonessential tasks on hold (unimportant things like software development, security, stability, release management and the like) to focus exclusively on these very important questions:
In 2016 Tim Otten wrote a manifesto of sorts which outlined a practical and effective way to modernize CiviCRM. It boiled down to 5 letters: LExIM. 5 years on, CiviCRM is indeed in better shape than it was then, thanks to a tenacious community of developers following this path. So what is LExIM, why has it gotten us where we are today, and where are we headed?
Form Builder is a promising new cross-platform tool for making forms that sync with CiviCRM data. It's more powerful flexible than Profiles, and more compatible than proprietary plugins like Caldera. The only downside is that it's not finished. It is currently included with CiviCRM as a beta extension, but we can change that.
The Core Team has been hard at work on the new Form Builder for CiviCRM. Code-named "Afform" (the Affable Administrative Angular Form Framework) - the project is growing into a robust app for composing forms for all different purposes.
With generous support from the community funding our first Form Builder Make-it-happen campaign, Tim Otten & Coleman Watts have begun regular code sprints for phase 1 of the Form Builder project. The extension is evolving rapidly, but I wanted to take a break from development for a few minutes to update you on what we've accomplished so far and where we go from here.
It's here! Thanks to over $16,000 contributed by 24 individuals and organizations, we are pleased to announce the official release of the Contact Layout Editor. The success of this Make-It-Happen campaign is a tribute to the power of the CiviCRM user community coming together to create something that benefits everyone.
One of the most requested features in CiviCRM over the years has been to tweak the Contact Summary page. That's the main Contact view, the "heart" of CiviCRM. And now, thanks to 12 donors contributing a total of $12,860.00 in the past month, we've almost reached our goal.
