Ginkgo Street Labs is excited to announce that the first beta release of CiviVolunteer 2.0 is now available for test-driving as well as for downloading!
What’s New
- Public list of volunteer opportunities - Now volunteers can find all of your organization’s volunteer opportunities in one place, and they can sign up for multiple opportunities at once.
- A top level menu item - All of the volunteer configurations and screens are centralized under one neat menu.
- Standalone volunteer projects - Volunteer projects have a new home. There is no longer a need to create fake events to serve as “containers” for your volunteer projects, greatly improving the workflow for volunteer coordinators.
- Better support for multi-tenant systems - If your organization has chapters or affiliates which rely on you for volunteer management, you know how hard it can be to strike the balance between giving them sufficient access to the system and giving away the keys to the kingdom.
Contributors
We can’t thank you enough:
- The anonymous funder that made the matching campaign possible.
- The various small funders whose participation is no less instrumental in bringing this about.
- Friends of Georgia State Parks and Monuments for their generous funding.
- Horn Farm Center for Agricultural Education who has provided us valuable insight into their implementation.
- The New York City Coalition Against Hunger for their custom implementation and funding for the base extension.
- The SIFMA Foundation.
- The CiviCRM Partner community for their promotion of the fundraiser.
Call for Beta Testers
You may have been imagining some of the new features from previous blog posts. Now you can try them out! You will notice that CiviVolunteer is no longer buried down in the Events Settings form; look in the CiviCRM top menu for a “Volunteers” item where you can manage related settings, create or manage projects, or navigate to the Opportunities search form.
If you really want to go to town trying to break the system, or have a complex use case that will take you some time to configure, you may consider installing the extension on your own testing environment. (We do not recommend that you install the extension on a live CiviCRM instance just yet.) Some installation items of note:
- CiviVolunteer 2.0 presently requires that org.civicrm.angularprofiles be installed to support using the profile selector widget on Angular pages.
- The patch for CRM-17192 fixes a bug in which certain select2 widgets do not prepopulate correctly. Leaving it unpatched results in the illusion that your selections have not been saved when you edit an existing project.
- There are a lot of new permissions in CiviVolunteer. If you want anonymous users to be able to view and sign up for volunteer opportunities, be sure they have the “CiviVolunteer: register to volunteer” and “CiviCRM: access AJAX API” permissions.
Whether you try it on the demo site or install your own copy, please do report any bugs you find.
Known Issues
The Volunteer tab on the Event configuration screen hasn’t yet been retrofitted with the changes we’ve made in the new volunteer project forms. As a result, the Volunteer tab presently shows errors. In this beta release, please ignore the volunteer tab and instead exercise the standalone screens.
