Blogs

We started and ended CiviCon Denver this year by talking about community participation. In her keynote presentation, Stormy Peters of the Mozilla Foundation introduced it and discussed the value of participation in open source communities as well as how it represented a competitive advantage to proprietary software alternatives.

We recently updated our appeal for financial support on our download page and included a financial metric with two specific elements that I want to expand upon. In essence, we’ve published both the absolute dollar amount needed to balance the remainder of our 2015 budget (~ $300k) and we’ve qualified it by stating that this is the amount necessary for sustainability.

IATS has been a payment processor extension with CiviCRM for quite a while and has been actively developed & supported. If you are using the IATS extension you can say a quiet thank you to Alan, Karin & Stephen & stop reading.

Thank you to everyone who has submitted sessions so far! They are all pretty awesome!

Cividesk will be offering on-line classes for new users (Contacts, Membership, Events and Contribution management) during the month of August.  Classes are two hours in length and are limited in size to allow for questions from students throughout the session.

Click here to see a class schedule for August and to access registration information.

If you travel to DC for work or family frequently you may be tired of doing the same old tourism and want to mix things up. In anticipation of the User Summit, we've compiled a list of a few things to do that aren't on the Mall, that are inexpensive, and are Metro accessible. So while the Mall and Smithsonians are treasures in DC, there is a lot more to do here. Here are some other ideas from a couple locals:

Drupal 8 is likely to be released around September. Fuzion have been driving the initiative to have CiviCRM ready to roll when Drupal 8 is released and there have already been some generous sponsors for our work to help get us this far.

During the past year, I've been working with a number of medium and larger organizations using CiviCRM, and have found a few gaps in CiviCRM's CiviContribute functionality, particularly around the management of recurring donors, which are often a really important part of a larger organizations' donor base.

To this end, I'm happy to share a couple of extensions that I've been developing to fill these holes, detailed below.

Feedback and patches welcome, as usual. 

The team is super excited to announce that CiviCRM 4.6.5 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.6 demo site.