Civi - What's Happening?

So, far the response to Civi-Make-it-Happen has been good. We have got one small item sponsored into 3.3 and a number of donations towards the other items. It also shows on the second search page when you google for 'Make it Happen' :-). As discussed previously there is an option to have your money refunded if the target is not reached by the deadline. Of the contributions made so far the only person who took up that option was contributing towards the CMS User Merge enhancement that is being funded. My perception is that the contributions made so far are primarily by individuals and consultants or end-users who engage directly with CiviCRM (rather than larger organisations who may engage the services of a consultant) and that they are primarily given in support of CiviCRM rather than reflecting a business decision to invest in getting desired functionality. Perhaps I should ask more questions on the contribution page!

 

We are extending the 3.3 deadline to the 3rd of October to make one last push towards getting more of the initiatives into 3.3 and after that the focus will move to trying to get some more momentum for 3.4. Personally I would LOVE to see the dedupe exception table item get some funding. Anyone who has done deduping themselves will understand why!

 

Looking forwards to 3.4 we will probably re-seed all the items that have received donations this time around (or maybe consider a 10% cut-off?) and add a couple more.

 

There are some that have been suggested and the criteria will probably be a mixture of perceived demand and commitments to put up seed funding. Here's some of the suggestions that have been made since I posted my first blog on this

 

1) Pick the top item/s off Gregory Heller's User Voice list - this list does need a bit of clean-up and it would be great to see a few more votes on it too but at the moment clean urls are at the top

 

2) Have CiviCRM implement an easy backup-and-restore function (see thread)

 

3) Improve sort order options in Civi-Report http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=11441.0

 

4) Integration with the Drupal Rules Module

 

5) Setting up default contribution page ids for membership types (so that the 'renew' link shows on user dashboards even if the original membership was done through a back-office registration)

 

6) Authorize.net recurring payments functionality & possibly as an add-on have recurring payments update memberships? (I'm a little confused about the requirements here)

 

7) Address management on import option: The current auto-merge (on-import) options only allow you to use the Update mode, which re-writes the current value of each field with the new value, or the Fill mode, which does not re-write the old value and discards the new value. My client would like a 'Grab Everything' option which would add the new value in addition to the old one (as is possible in manual merge using Add New). Ideally, when a contact is identified as a match by the current selected rule, the system would check each phone number in the dupe against all phone numbers in the main record. Should the phone number already be in the main record somewhere, then it isn't merged, but if it isn't in the main record, it is merged using Add New so that it does not rewrite any phone number which may already be listed in that field in the main record. It would do the same thing with email addresses and perhaps with street addresses too.