Blogs

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.

We've been having quite a few requests for the ability to modify and extend the types of contact records which we can be stored in CiviCRM (currently limited to Individuals, Households and Organizations). Thanx to the nice folks at Alpha International, we will be adding the ability to rename or "hide" the existing Contact Types AND define Contact Sub-types as part of CiviCRM v3.1. Here is a first draft of what we plan to implement. Your comments and feedback are appreciated. Contact Sub-types In v3.1 we will introduce the notion of a Contact Sub-type. This will allow users to create specific types of Contacts for their use cases. For example, a school could introduce three new sub-types: Student, Parent and Staff. Sub-Types will inherit from one of the three contact types (Individuals in this case). Sub-types will have all the properties and features of the main contact types. Thus an admin will be able to:

We’re happy to announce that CiviCRM 3.0.beta1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites. Check out the blog entry announcing 3.0.alpha1 release for a run-down of what’s new in CiviCRM 3.0, and this list for issues that were fixed since 3.0.alpha3. A full list of changes, improvements and bug fixes in 3.0 release is also available on the wiki and in the issue tracker.

I continue my work on deploying CiviCRM for my kids school. In previous blog posts i documented how to use hooks and custom templates to schedule parent teacher conferences and extended care activities and how to expose relationship information in a profile view. In this blog post I'll describe some more advanced features. I'll also describe the code and directory structure. New Code Structure and Directory Layout

About 8 weeks ago we began looking into a CiviCRM / QuickBooks integration framework. Our goal is to write a module that allows CiviCRM contributions and contact information to be written to QuickBooks. Our target version is QuickBooks 2009 Premier Non-Profit edition, since that's what we use.

At the very least, the module should be able to:

A problem with using Civi for a members’ website based on Joomla is the need to be able to control access for different types of user – for example you might want ordinary members to be able to edit their own details but not see the details of other members for privacy reasons. But perhaps some groups of members might want to see each others details.

UPDATE: Please refer to more recent blog post to find out about more CiviCRM related Mozilla Service Week activities! Mozilla Service Week is coming up in just one month - September 14 to 21, 2009! The driving force behind this event is a strong belief that everyone should know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a great experience when they're online. During those 7 days you are encouraged to share, give, engage, create, and collaborate by offering your time and talent to local organizations to make their Internet use easier and more effective. CiviCRM, among others, became a partner of this initiative.

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".

With every release, we're getting more and more support from the community. It definitely makes us happy and proud to see the adoption of CiviCRM growing. With 3.0 release, we would like to both encourage even more participation and say thank you to most active community contributors. Therefore, we're announcing Top Bug Hunter/Huntress Challenge in 3.0 release cycle! What do you need to do to participate? It's quite simple - just help us test CiviCRM 3.0 while it's in alpha and beta stage. You can do it in following ways: Log in to CiviCRM 3.0 public sandbox and try out your favourite features. If you find a problem, please report it on the appropriate board of our forum. Please remember to include clear description of the problem, steps to reproduce it, potentially error message or traceback information. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset. Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 3.0 - let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you've done this, play around with your favourite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 3.0 alpha testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers! Go through the CiviCRM 3.0 Documentation, help us improve it and make it relevant to upcoming version before we reach beta state (estimated 3 weeks). It's a wiki, so after creating an account, you can fix problems and add missing information. If you're a developer and have PHP skills, you can submit a patch through our issue tracker. Just create an issue, attaching a patch file that fixes a problem you've discovered in the CiviCRM 3.0 codebase. We will be monitoring activity on the forum and in issues tracker over next few weeks. After we release CiviCRM 3.0 stable (which is planned to happen in around 4-6 weeks), core team members will evaluate community members activities and pick the most active person. The winner will be awarded with iPod touch 8 GB, with special dedication engraved on it. Another 4 most active people will win special CiviCRM t-shirts. Please take into consideration, that these t-shirts will be the first ones produced by the project and will definitely become a priceless collectible one day, when CiviCRM is The Open Source Solution for Non-profit Sector (even more than it's now). ;-) So - test away, see you on forums and in issue tracker! :-)