This month's Community Advisory Group phone conference focused on the usability improvements which are being implemented for the 2.3 release. The advisory group was responsible for making usability the top priority for this next release, and they've been quite involved throughout the 2.3 release cycle - identifying pain points, suggesting new approaches, and helping to prioritize the issues.
I had asked group members to review the key change areas and if possible also gather end-user feedback from users inside their organization or clients. Overall the feedback was quite positive - and we also got some excellent suggestions.
You can check out the meeting agenda here - including a list of areas we reviewed. I've also added a section listing some of the recommended changes from the group. We'll be posting detailed blogs on most of the key changes in the coming weeks.
This ongoing dialog with a consistent and committed group of users and consultants has been enormously helpful for the project.
Blogs
Keep up-to-date with blogs from the core team, working groups, developers, users and champions worldwide. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive regular updates by email. We also have an RSS feed.
I'm working on setting up a "CiviCRM Planet" feed aggregator similar to that which exists for drupal at http://drupal.org/planet. Please post a link to your blog's feed of CiviCRM related posts in the comments here. If you do not yet have a civicrm specific feed, I recommend creating a tag or taxonomy term specifically for items you which to appear on CiviCRM planet. Might I suggest "CiviCRM Planet" or just "CiviCRM".
On Thursday, June 4 2009 we had a CiviCRM meetup in NY. We set up this event via CiviEvent a couple of weeks prior to the event. Cynthia T managed to get us a room at the American Friends Service Committee building near Union Square. We filled up the 28 open slots for the event fairly quickly. We had a pretty good mixture of people. From experienced users to a folks who were just getting started with CiviCRM and wanted to learn more.
As cap10morgan noted in a recent blog, non-profits and open source solutions are a natural partnership. CiviCRM has been a fabulous gift to the organization that I lead, Trinity Episcopal Church. It allowed us to move from a FileMaker database accessible only to our office staff to a robust solution accessible to most of our membership.
On a daily basis, we get quite a few interesting bugs / feature requests either via the IRC Channel or via the forums.
Greetings and Salutations :-)
As some of you may already know, the existing "Greeting Type" feature in CiviCRM is pretty broken. You can't use it to specify a greeting for either email or printed / postal communications (no token or export support). In addition, as described in Tony Guzman's recent blog on Better Household Management - it's not designed to support a number of key use cases.
So... Tony and the folks at Dharmatech have been working with us to figure out a flexible WORKING solution which can handle the simple cases ("Dear Dave") as well as the more complex cases ("Dear Dave and Bob", "The Honorable Scout Conberg", etc.). If you haven't read Tony's blog yet - start with the Greetings and Salutations section there. Then, if this is an issue that affects you - check out the details of the proposed implementation in the issue tracker.
Folks gathered this past Monday evening for the first-ever San Francisco CiviCRM Meetup. We had a decent turnout - especially given the short notice (we wanted to squeeze this in before our India colleagues had to return to Mumbai).
We started with the usual introductory rounds - nice mix of backgrounds ranging from CiviCRM newbies to experienced users and consultants. Tomasz Finc from the WikiMedia Foundation then gave an awesome presentation about how they are using CiviCRM for fundraising and donor management. (Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit which operates Wikipedia along with a number of other projects dedicated to creating and supporting collaboratively edited reference projects.)
We are looking for folks who can help us out at the following events. Both these events are in the San Francisco Bay Area
Just a very quick post to let you guys know that the site that has consumed my life for the past 6 months has finally gone live. I am running a _very_ customised version of civicrm 2.1 on top of a drupal install. I'd like to thank all those that helped me to get to grips with the hows and wherefores of civicrm and for putting up with me on the irc channel.
The team has released version 2.2.5 with approximately 31 bug fixes and improvements. Notable fixes and improvements include:
Discount Support for Online Event Registration using hooks (more)
Enable Joomla / Standalone to use the mighty power of hooks
You can review a complete list of 2.2.5 changes on the issue tracker.
Download
You can download CiviCRM 2.2.5 at our download page. Select from the civicrm-stable section. The filenames include the 2.2.5 label: civicrm-2.2.…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal / Joomla! / Standalone).
