Blog posts by lobo

Our current support policy is to support and bug fix only the latest stable release of CiviCRM. This is primarily due to the amount of time and effort it takes to support multiple releases at the same time. As our user, integrator and developer base increases we expect this policy to change.

Both Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5 are fairly active releases with support for those releases expected to last for another 12 months or more (based on when the next version is released). However the next version of CiviCRM, v4.1, will only support Drupal 7.x and Joomla 1.6.x based on our current support policy.

We do understand that a large number of our users will still be on the older versions of Drupal and Joomla. If you are not planning to upgrade to the latest version of Drupal/Joomla, please contribute to the Make It Happen that will allow us to extend support for Drupal 6 / Joomla 1.5 for another release. This will ensure that these releases will be supported at least till Mar, 2012. Based on our current schedule, Drupal 6 / Joomla 1.5 will not be supported from Sep, 2011.

Update: We now have sponsorship committed for 63% of this project and have started a Make-it-Happen Campaign!

CiviEvent is the most popular CiviCRM Component. We get a steady stream of feature requests along with quite a few patches. We were approached recently by an organization that wanted to add Reminder Emails for CiviEvent.

We had a quick online and offline conversation with them and realized that there was a fair amount of cool integration so an event administrator could schedule and send messages to event participants. Briefly the set of features would include:

We held our second CiviCon in Chicago on Monday Mar 7, 2011 at TechNexus. We had an amazing turnout of 100+ community members. CiviCon 2011 was made possible by a great group. I'd personally like to acknowledge and thank the folks who made this possible...

We just got back from Chicago where we had an eventful CiviCon 2011 on Mon, Mar 7th. We had more than 100 participants (registration, attendance sheets and name badges managed with CiviEvent) from across various parts of the US and Canada. We also had a successful sponsorship program with 4 Gold Sponsors, 5 Silver Sponsors and 10 Bronze Sponsors (managed by CiviContribute and the CiviEvent discount module). A companion blog post highlights all the wonderful women and men (and organizations) who made this event possible. Some of my personal highlights of the trip:

Overview and New Features in CiviCRM v3.4 / v4.0 With the release of 3.4.alpha1, a brief tour of some of the new features and changes in v3.4 / v4.0 is in order. This release had 7 successful Make It Happen Projects. We also had a record number of patches (100+) that were incorporated into this release.

Update December 20th: CiviCRM 4.1 for WordPress is currently in alpha stage. Features for this release include:

* Access all CiviCRM back-office functions as a plugin in the WordPress Dashboard. Admin, editor and author roles have full access. Granular permissioning by role is planned for a future release.

* Create online contribution pages, online event registration pages, and profiles - and include as public pages in your WordPress site (front-end).

A large organization using CiviCRM is planning to switch to using CiviMail for their broadcast email needs. This is great news for CiviMail and will take it to the next level in terms of feature set and functionality. As part of their migration, we are integrating a workflow engine into CiviMail. For this version, we will be using Drupal's rules module, thus making it Drupal specific. (if you are a joomla user and interested in sponsoring this for CiviCRM on Joomla, please contact us via email / IRC). For this project, we'll be focussed on extending the CiviMail schema to facilitate workflow. Sending a broadcast email will be split into three steps:

As we are getting ready to roll out the first alpha for CiviCRM v3.3, I figured a status update on some of the cool new features of 3.3 was in order. So without further ado, here are some of the cool new features that are part of 3.3

We just completed a CiviCRM Code Sprint in NY. A big tip of the hat to Rayogram for providing the space and coordinating the logistics, especially to Kyle Jester. Thanx to Chang and Matt from emotive LLC for providing breakfast and lunch during the sprint.