The holiday season is almost upon us. So we thought we’d round up a top ten of 2013 to highlight what we have achieved as a community this year. Of course, this is just the tip of the CiviCRM iceberg! We’d love to hear about your achievements in the comments below.
1. Three awesome conferences
This year we had three amazing CiviCRM events in San Francisco, DC, and London. Our SF and London conferences got supersized to two days and had more attendees than ever before. We were also treated to our first ever East Coast conference: CiviCamp DC, which was great to see. Thanks to everyone that organised these events - it’s a big commitment and we appreciate your work.
2. Woolman and Dalesbridge Sprints
Directly after our SF and London conferences, we headed off for sprints at Woolman (the Sierra foothills, California) and Dalesbridge (in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales). Sprints are amazing events. Getting 20 - 30 people together who are passionate about CiviCRM when everyone is energized after the conference is a great formula for getting stuff done and moving the project forward in multiple directions. Have a read of some of our sprint blog posts and book yourself into the next sprint.
3. Two feature packed new releases (4.3 and 4.4)
It’s official - we now have a regular six month release cycle, with stable versions of CiviCRM released to coincide with our Spring and Autumn conferences. 4.3 and 4.4 were packed with new features and improvements, including faster searches, event badges, soft credit tracking, and CiviVolunteer, CiviDiscount and CiviHR extensions. Check out the 4.3 and 4.4 release blog posts for a run down on what was new.
4. Our Partner Program
This August, we launched the first of a series of new initiatives to ensure CiviCRM is sustainable for years to come. 49 service providers have already signed up and shown their commitment to CiviCRM this year. Thanks to all of them. If you provide CiviCRM services and have not signed up yet, have a look at the benefits here and sign up before the end of this year to become a partner in 2014.
5. CiviDay
I know it’s a long time ago, but cast your memory back to January this year. We held our inaugural CiviDay with CiviCRM meet ups in 24 cities worldwide. The next CiviDay is on January 29th, and our focus is on outreach to new and potential users. More details to follow soon.
6. More CiviCRM cloud offerings
For most people, hosting your own CiviCRM is a pain. So why do it yourself when there are services out there that take all the hard work out of it? Our new hosting pages list organisations that specialise in providing turnkey CiviCRM solutions. Drupal users should also checkout the Drupal and CiviCRM starter kit which makes it easy to get up and running quickly.
7. Community Newsletter
Since April this year, we’ve been publishing a monthly newsletter packed with the latest from the CiviCRM world. This has generated quite a lot of new contributions to our blog and we’re hearing more and more about how people are using CiviCRM. Remember - it is your newsletter so if you have something you want to shout about, let us know and we’ll include it. Sign up from our homepage if you’re not already subscribed and review past editions here.
8. Extensions: CivHR, CiviVolunteer and CiviBooking
This year saw the release of a tonne of great and clever ways to extend CiviCRM functionality via extensions. You can browse all extensions in the CiviCRM extension directory. We thought it was worth highlighting three of the bigger extensions: CivHR, CiviVolunteer and CiviBooking, because they represent a shift in approach to developing CiviCRM. Our aim is to make it easier you to create new functionality for CiviCRM, so we can concentrate on delivering a stable core CiviCRM that you can build on.
9. CiviCRM Moves to Git
One for the developers: we’ve moved our code repositories to Git and improved our development workflows so developers can collaborate more easily. The GitHub web interface makes it easier than ever for anyone to review additions and changes to the codebase.
10. More training options
2013 saw the launch of a lot of new training initiatives, including quite a few remote options. CiviTeacher is a new how-to video subscription service dedicated to helping you learn CiviCRM. Each month we have an introductory webinar for people that are new to CiviCRM (the next one is December 3rd), and we’ve just seen the launch of a new how-to video project that aims to create a series of publicly accessible CiviCRM videos. The CiviCRM 2 day training course has been also been revised and you should check it out if you’re planning trainings for your staff, clients or the general public.
So how was it for you? Did we miss your highlight? We’d love to hear the best things that happened to you in CiviCRM land this year.
