Blogs

Coding has been completed for the phase 1 features of CiviCase - our new case management component, and we're deep into a quality assurance cycle as I type this. (If you haven't been following the evolution of this project, you can check out earlier posts here.) One of the cool things about CiviCase is that it allows organizations to configure workflows for the different types of cases they handle. We're implementing these work-flows for "physicians' health" cases in collaboration with our sponsor for the project - Physician Health Program of British Columbia. I'd also like to include sample configurations for several other case management settings when we release CiviCase as part of v2.2. For example, workflows for organizations who provide housing assistance, or family services or .... In order to accomplish this (in more than a half-***** way) - I'd like to hook up with folks who have some experience in one or more of these areas. If you work with an organization that could use a tool like CiviCase to help with their work - and is up for acting as a beta site - that would be even better. If you have questions about whether CiviCase is a "good fit" your organization - please post them to the CiviCase forum board with as much detail as possible about your requirements. If you can help out with constructing sample configurations, please ping me at dave at civicrm dot org.

Hello everyone, Tags are a powerful way of organising contacts, and you can use them to add topics of interest, type of organisations, type of donors... as you might already have discovered, you can quickly get a lot of them, and it becomes quite difficult to use them properly as soon as you have more than an handful.

It's that time of year again!

No, not what you think. :-) It's the time of year when new a CiviCRM version is behind the door, and it has cool new features. Code freeze is going to be introduced any day now - and we'll move on to quality assurance, alphas, betas and other equally exciting stuff.

Let me briefly introduce you to two new 2.2 features: one of them already mentioned here and there - Personal Contribution Pages (PCP), and a "last minute" addition - Soft Credits.

The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) published the results of it's first-ever Donor Management Software (DMS) Satisfaction Survey last week. Nearly 1,000 people participated in the survey - whose goal was to help nonprofits "find the DMS that is best for your organization". Regulars readers of this blog will recall that we were quite disappointed when the survey was announced - due to the fact that CiviCRM was NOT INCLUDED In the list of Donor Management Software solutions in the survey. The good news is that folks in our community stepped up nicely. Despite being a "write-in candidate" CiviCRM got the fourth highest number of respondents to the question "Please select the product that you consider your PRIMARY donor management system."

CiviMail is getting another major upgrade in 2.2. Some of the features coming in 2.2 include: PHP return channel solution. This feature should enable more folks to install and run CiviMail. This will obsolete our amavisd return channel solution. No perl or sys admin / root access expertise needed any more :) Adding CiviMail as an "action" to search results. This feature will allow folks to send a mailing to a "dynamic smart group" and alleviate the need to create multiple groups just for civimail purposes. Thus if you want to send a targeted mailing to all the folks in the 94135 zip code in your "we want more green trees" group, you enter the relevant search parameters (check the group and type the zip code), do the search and invoke the "Send Bulk Email" action. You can read more about this issue here Adding token hooks and ability to send "templatized" emails. This is described in more detail below

Over the last week or two a growing number of folks have been discussing improvements to the REST API. Several months back I wrote a small patch that opened the experimental REST interface to the whole API of the system. When that happened a few other people started to show some interest in what could be done with this new functionality.

There are a couple changes being worked on, and several more proposed for future work.

Our global meeting resulted in some new features being added to 2.2. Our team worked on a new jQuery based country/state selector and incorporating hook(s) to the "amount" functionality of online contribution and event registration pages. I'll give a brief description of the feature set and functionality of these projects New jQuery based State Country widget Our previous widget was a dojo based combo box widget. Both the country and the state were ajax based combo boxes. The state combo box was dependent on the value chosen in the country combo box. This implementation was quite complex and not easily replicated (hence u did not see the widget in many places). For 2.2 we took a slightly different approach: The country field is a simple html select box (the values are restricted by the countries configured in the admin area). The state selector is now dynamic and refreshed with new values whenever the country is changed. We took inspiration and borrowed a fair part of the code from: Simple chained combobox plugin for jQuery.

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.