Blog posts by Dave Greenberg

Looking for an opportunity to network and share expertise with other folks in the non-profit technology eco-system? The Nonprofit Dev Summit takes place in Oakland, California next week - November 17-19. Depending on attendee interest, I'm prepared to facilitate several CiviCRM-related sessions - as well as a few training modules (intro, advanced and/or developer oriented). I'm also planning on sharing a first look at the upcoming CiviCase case management module. And... there are lots of cool-sounding session on topics ranging from cloud computing to security audits and hosting. You can browse the current list of proposed sessions on the Aspiration wiki. "The 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit will be the second annual convening of people and organizations developing software tools, web applications and other technology to support social justice causes. Bringing together a diverse range of developers, technologists, managers, eRiders, integrators, users and other practitioners who self-identify under the umbrella of roles around “developing nonprofit software”, the 2008 DevSummit will provide an opportunity both to gather as a community and to take stock of the field, while building connections and capacity." It would be great to have a solid group of CiviCRM community members at this summit - so check it out and join us if you can.

One of the mini-projects that we worked on during our San Francisco meetup / code sprint was improving the way name and address data is handled during payment transactions (e.g. online contributions, membership signup and event registration). Our goals were: Prevent name, email address and postal address information collected during a payment transaction from over-writing existing "non-billing-related" data. Store the billing name and address info for EACH transaction - so that it can be retrieved for audit / reconciliation purposes. Set a foundation for a more "shopping-cart" style interface where logged in users can select from a set of previously used billing locations.

CiviCase is a new component for CiviCRM targeted at organizations who provide case management services. It is being developed In partnership with the Physician Health Program of British Columbia (PHP-BC). In addition to providing funding for this project, PHP-BC is providing invaluable domain expertise and the current plan is for their staff to start using CiviCase in January 2009. You can learn more about how this project got started and the project goals from these blog posts and the requirements overview. CiviCase Phase 1 is a major part of the upcoming 2.2 release - and several members of the core team are gathered in San Francisco this month working on bringing it to life. Last week we had a two day "in-person" meetup with PHP-BC folks (Andrew Clarke, Claire Sauve, and Dave D) where we reviewed work in progress and got detailed feedback on the basic workflows and screens, as well as the data model and configurability of the component. That meeting resulted in some key refinements and additions to the phase 1 specification - and provided a good reality-check for the project!

We've begun our planning for CiviCRM trainings and meetups for 2009 - and we'd love to get feedback from folks in the community about interests and availability for these events ... We're considering three different types of events for the calendar: Advanced User Training - We held several 2-day sessions this year - focused on the skills needed to configure, customize and use CiviCRM advanced features. These sessions were well received - so we're planning on doing several more in 2009. Fees for these sessions are based on operating expenses. User Group Meetings - Half or full-day meetups where folks can share experiences and learnings, network, and discuss the future of the platform. Developer Camps - These 1 or 2 day sessions are "learn by doing" events where developers can work together with core team members on specific projects

I'm happy to announce that we've finally gotten our act together and configured a complete public demo for the Joomla! version of CiviCRM 2.1. Joomla! users and integrators will finally be able to try out CiviCRM for Joomla! without going through the process of setting up their own site. We think this will be a good step forward in strengthening the Joomla! part of the CiviCRM community. The front-end demo site includes links to test-drive public-facing features: online contribution page membership signup page event info and registration page

After more than 7 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 2.1 Stable. You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our public demo site. 2.1 features a number of exciting new features, including... Joomla! 1.5 and Drupal 6 compatibility (CiviCRM 2.1 is NOT compatible with Drupal 5.x or Joomla! 1.0.x) Production-ready "standalone" version of CiviCRM (with thanks to U.S. PIRG) Contribution Pledges (back-office and self-service) Multi-language / single site support (with thanks to Google Summer of Code and the Joomla! team) Nesting (hierarchy) for groups (with thanks to U.S. PIRG) Contribution, participant and membership export improvements (with thanks to American Friends Service Committee) CiviCRM Home / Dashboard customization (with thanks to Frontline Defenders) Several usabiilty improvements including basic and quick search improvements (with thanks to CivicActions), and elimination of the annoying page reloads when entering contributions, memberships, and event registrations. FCKEdit and TinyMCE rich text editors Early-bird (date-based) discounts for events Multi-participant event registration Dedupe design and scalability improvements New tools for developers to extend and customize CiviCRM - including form hooks, adding PHP to custom fields, REST support for selected APIs, DB-driven menus and more. .... and 200+ more smaller improvements and bug fixes You can find Release Highlights here, and check out the resolved issues listing for details on the 570+ improvements and bug fixes. A big round of applause is due to all the folks who downloaded, tested and submitted bug reports during the 2.1 release cycle. The alpha and beta packages were downloaded more than 4,000 times . 250+ bugs and "improvements" were reported by community members and fixed by the team during the release cycle. A special shout-out goes to some of the "heroes" who made significant contributions through both design and testing of this release - Mark Burdett, Chris Burgess, Matt Chapman, Peter Davis, Father Shawn (Duncan), Xavier Dutoit, Tony Guzman, Dave Hansen-Lange, Eileen McNaughton, Wes Morgan, Chris Mott, Brian Shaughnessy, Cynthia Tarascio, Elin Waring. This is another huge increase improvement in community participation in bullet-proofing a release - and should help make this our highest quality release yet.

We were planning on pushing out 2.1 stable this week - but a few too many "need to fix" issues surfaced (thanks to some dilegent community testers). So we've released a 6th Beta distribution this week and targeted stable release for next week. You can download 2.1 Beta 6 now on SourceForge.

If you are planning on using new 2.1 features AND / OR upgrading an existing site to 2.1 - NOW is the time to test the upgrade with YOUR DATA and identify any remaining issues with new or existing features. The development team will actively work with you resolve any upgrade issues during this phase of the release cycle. If you submitted bugs to the 2.1 queue and haven't yet confirmed the fixes - PLEASE take the time to retest now.

If you are unable to test the release by downloading it - then the next best thing is to try out the new features, bug fixes, as well as the workflows you use most often by logging in to the public demo.

One of the many cool new features in 2.1 is the ability to view annual and monthly contribution totals in a bar or pie chart format by clicking a link on the CiviContribute dashboard. The charts are rendered by passing the contribution totals to Google's Chart API. We think this is a useful feature (at least for some folks). However, several folks on our team have noted that some organizations may not be comfortable with passing contribution totals to an external service over the internet. Given those concerns, we've added some help text which attempts to make things "transparent" - and including information about removing the link for folks who are concerned... IMPORTANT: This feature uses Google's public chart-drawing service. Your monthly and annual contribution totals will be sent over the internet to Google's servers. No contributor data is sent - only totals. However, if you are concerned about the privacy of your contribution totals - you should NOT use this feature. You can remove the link by editing the template file at templates/CRM/Contribution/Page/Dashboard.tpl. It would be helpful to get feedback from the community about how big a concern this is - and whether the explanation we've added to the help text (copied above) is clear.

The Nonprofit Technology Network - NTEN - is holding it's annual conference in San Francisco next April. This is the largest annual gathering of the non-profit tech community in the U.S - and it's a great opportunity for folks in our CiviCRM community to connect and share and help promote CiviCRM. This year NTEN is using a new voting process to decide which sessions get included in the schedule. Three exciting CiviCRM-related sessions are on the "ballot" - thanks to David Geilhufe, Michelle Murrain (Non Profit Open Source Initiative), Sue Gardner (Wikimedia Foundation), Wes Morgan (Fund for the Public Interest), Rick Cohen (National Council of Nonprofit Associations), and Jeff Porter (Foundation for Prader-Willi Research). Even if you're not sure about attending NTC - help get these sessions on the schedule by taking a few minutes to vote for them. All you need to do is go to the linked pages below and click on the "stars": Anatomy of Open-source Fundraising - Wikimedia Foundation Events Management: Tales from the Trenches Selecting and Implementing Open Source Constituent Relationship Management: views from the trenches with CiviCRM, MPower & Sugar The New Peacebuilding Paradigm: Women in Connection x the Internet = Exponential Change Take a few minutes and VOTE NOW. It's a quick and easy way to "give back" and help CiviCRM grow and thrive.

NTEN's 2009 annual conference is being held in San Francisco April 26-28. The deadline for submitting session proposals is September 12th (yes - really soon).

David Geilhufe is going to submit several session proposals - and needs a few more folks who are planning on being at the conference AND who are willing to discuss any or all of the following topics as part of a panel: