Blog posts by Dave Greenberg

After more than 7 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 3.0 Stable. We think that 3.0 marks a major milestone for CiviCRM - with major usability and workflow improvements and a new cleaner "look and feel". You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our public demo site. Some of the exciting features in 3.0 include: Reporting - More than 20 reports are included in this release. You can customize these report instances AND create new instances with different filters and display columns from the Report Templates screens. Redesigned contact summary and contact edit screens - These screens have been completely redesigned to maximize readability. Tabs now display the number of records (e.g. contributions, events, etc.) - so you don't have to open a tab to see if the contact has any records of that type. Create contacts while recording contributions, memberships, event registrations and cases - Use the configurable "new contact" pop-up form to create a contact "inline" if a contact is not already in your database. Configurable drill-down menus - New navigation bar gives you one-click access to almost any screen or function. AND you can modify and rearrange the menus to suit your organizations needs. You can add links to commonly used profile forms, other related web applications...any web page. Improved Send Email screen - Includes support to CC and BCC, as well as improved layout. Context menu for contact actions - From any contact search results list, you can right-click a contact row with your mouse get a menu of actions such as "Record Contribution", "Register for Event" and more. Event Templates and streamlined event configuration screens - You can use event templates to simplify the process of creating similar events - store the common configuration settings in the template and then select it when you create a new event. A new unit testing framework and the first stages in building a comprehensive test suite which will significantly improve quality and stability of releases going forward. Powerful new hooks for integrators and developers who need to extend and customize existing features. Check out Lobo's blog for some detailed examples of customization via hooks. .... and 300+ additional improvements and bug fixes You can find more detailed Release Highlights here.

Sorry for the short notice - but I just got a reminder that the deadline for submission of session suggestions for the 2010 NTC is this coming Monday (9/21). The conference is April 8-10 in Atlanta GA. Many of you have attended in the past - it's a pretty big deal at least for US non-profits. It's definitely a great opportunity for exposure and can be an awesome way to help promote CiviCRM as a project. I would encourage any of you who are interested in seeing CiviCRM related session(s) on the agenda to jump in a submit session suggestions (you can submit several): Submit session suggestions here In general, case study / success stories are well received ("Pump up your online fundraising with open source tools"). You do NOT need to volunteer to lead the session in order to suggest it (altho I suspect that helps) :-) Last years sessions that had some CiviCRM content included: Selecting and Implementing Open Source Constituent Relationship Management: Views from the Trenches with CiviCRM, MPower & SugarCRM Users. Not your Parent's Custom Application: Building Exactly What you Need on top of a Platform CRM Sewing Circle If you do submit sessions - let me know and we'll be sure to blog about them since the next step is a community voting process - and we can encourage folks in the community to vote for your sessions.

There was a thread in the forum a few weeks ago about adding generic replacements for tokens that dont have a value for a specific contact. An example is where the first name field is blank and the organization would want to substitute friend or member instead of keeping it blank. The token engine does not provide this functionality by default, however implementing it via a hook is relatively trivial.

CiviCRM has included a plugin for interfacing United States Postal Services (USPS) Address Standardization web service for quite a number of releases. However, the USPS rules for using the service have been a bit hard to pin down and getting authorization from is apparently hit or miss. There have been a few forum posts indicating success using the plugin with CiviCRM versions 1.8 and possibly 1.9. However, since then we've pretty much only had reports of problems related to folks enabling the feature without having a valid account etc.

I've been offline for a week, so a bit of delay in continuing this discussion on Invoicing and Accounting Integration. I thought it would be helpful to jump in with a quick review / reminder of existing functionality and data structures and some thoughts about what's missing based on my understanding "so far".

The second SF Bay Area User Meetup was hosted last night by Wikia and Wikimedia Foundation folks (big claps). We had an excellent turnout (the room was packed) - with a nice mix of backgrounds ranging from prospective users to experienced folks and a few developers. The first part of the meeting featured 3 presentations: Case Study: Chez Panisse Foundation - Evaluating a CRM solution and the process of migrating to CiviCRM (Max La Riviere-Hedrick : futurepruf.com) Case Study: Generations Community Wellness: Donate Your Fat - Building a rich community engagement site on top of CiviCRM (Roberto Santiago : raSantiago.com). You can download Roberto's slides here. What's coming up in v3.0 (yours truly - with a great slideshow created by Brian Shaughnessy - Lighthouse Consulting and Design)

The team has released version 2.2.8 today. This release includes an important security update for sites which use CiviCRM Profiles to collect and / or share contact data. We recommend that all sites install this upgrade as soon as possible. Details here: Affects Joomla! sites only Affects all sites using Profiles 2.2.8 also includes fixes for IE8 compatibility, some improvements in Views2 integration and approximately 30 other minor bug fixes. You can review a complete list of 2.2.8 changes on the issue tracker. Note that the IE8 fix causes the browser to run in IE7 compatibility mode for all CiviCRM pages.

Version 2.2.7 was released today with CiviReport ("the return") phase 1. This version includes fourteen report templates with coverage for contact data, activities, contributions, events and memberships. Folks in the community who have had a chance to preview the functionality have been quite excited - and we think this is a significant step forward for CiviCRM. First, a few concepts... CiviReport is delivered with a set of report templates. Each template covers a general reporting area - for example: Donor Report (Summary), LYBUNT (Last Year but not this Year), etc. Administrators can then create one or more report instances from a template - with specific display columns, filters and grouping rules. Users go to the CiviReport menu to see a list of report instances, and run the reports.  

The team has released version 2.2.7 today. This release includes an important security update - and we recommend that you upgrade sites to this release as soon as possible. 2.2.7 also includes phase 1 of CiviReport - with 14 built-in report templates with coverage of contact data, contributions, events and memberships. Stay tuned for a separate blog post with lots more details on the new reporting features.