Blogs

Thanks to Oliver Gibson (ICT champion for North West England) for finding us a venue for the next CiviCRM UK usergroup: Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisations (GMCVO) from 2.00 to 4.30pm on 30th September.

The team has been working hard to fix issues/ bugs as well as quite a few improvement suggestions reported by the community - and a third beta release of CiviCRM 2.1 is now available for download on SourceForge. We strongly encourage folks to download and test the beta release and help improve the final product. So test 2.1 Sandbox out now.

My self-appointed job is to hangout around here and complain about how CiviCRM could be more like Drupal or better implemented with Drupal. Instead of banning me from the forums and IRC for being annoying, Lobo gave me blogging access. So I'm writing to share about my latest campaign to Druplify CiviCRM.

The CiviCRM team branched off v2.1 late last week. We hope to knock off most of the remaining v2.1 issues over the next few days and release the the first beta candidate.

Most of you are aware that CiviCRM collects version, CMS and an MD5 hash of the base url from a CiviCRM install. We discussed this feature in the blog post: Extending the Version Check Mechanism in CiviCRM 2.0. The CiviCRM admin can decide not to participate in the ping back mechanism.

Here are some useful stats that we've collected using this feature: We've got close to 4000 installs running CiviCRM v2.0. Approx 66% are Drupal, 34% are Joomla. We have 133 installs testing various versions of 2.1 alpha, 98 Drupal / 35 Joomla.

The fourth (and probably final) 2.1 Alpha distribution is now available for download. We've gotten a decent amount of feedback from our community testers and reviewers - and have addressed almost all reported bugs as well as quite a few improvement suggestions.

David Geilhufe (full disclosure: he is on the board of Social Source Foundation, the non-profit behind CiviCRM) has written a good article on What is Donor Management Software. The article discusses some of the potential reasons on the exclusion of CiviCRM from the list of software products.

The last part of my Summer of Code project was multi-langage editing of the internationalised fields. The aim of this task was to be able to edit all language versions of a given field (say, a given contact’s first name) in a centralised place.

Do you use Drupal/CiviCRM or Joomla/CiviCRM to manage your donors? Do you think CiviCRM is a good fit for your donor management software needs? Show your appreciation for CiviCRM/Drupal/Joomla and open source software by taking part in the NTEN Donor Management Survey.