Blogs

We are excited to announce that our 1.8 Alpha release is now available for download, as well as testing on our sandbox site.

In addition to many new features in CiviCRM v1.8, we have worked on few improvements for CiviCRM Profile.

1. We have added functionality which allows people to create User Account in Drupal using CiviCRM profile. So this way, user can create customized User Registration pages without using default Drupal User Registration form.

For more details: CRM-1633

2. Another interesting feature for profile is Option to Generate Email Notifications when a profile is created or edited.

We started work on the Kabissa project in full swing early last week. This basically adds a few more enhanced features to managing contacts of an organization. You can find the full specs and description on our Kabissa - CiviCRM Project Specifications wiki page.

The new de-dupe functionality, introduced in CiviCRM 1.8, is configurable under Administer CiviCRM → Duplicate Contact Rules. This post describes the meaning of the fields and the way their contents impact the de-dupe search engine.

The first decision to make after going to Administer CiviCRM → Duplicate Contact Rules is which rule to edit. For CiviCRM 1.8 we decided to allow one rule per every contact type (individual, organization and household); in future versions this can be extended to arbitrary list of rules.

Code for Change, a group internship program for computer science students, is working on adding several features to CiviCRM this summer. U.S. PIRG launched Code for Change this summer for several reasons:

Earlier today we saw our 10,000 th commit :) For the curious, michal mach was responsible for this commit and the changeset is here (yes, i agree quite a disappointing 10,000th commit). For the curious, the changeset for the very first commit is here. This comes out to an average of approx 10.5 commits for every day (or approx 15 commits if u ignore weekends and holidays).

In 1.7, event management was added to CiviCRM. The timing on this was good for us (Ideal Solution, LLC), and allowed us to use CiviCRM for a customer who primarily wanted to allow members to sign up for events, such as conferences. The difficulty was that conferences typically have multiple options, each with its own additional price: basic registration, meals, guests, etc. Each additional option increases the total number of possible combinations. Price Sets were added to manage this.

Our friends at US PIRG have just started work on the Code for Change program. You can follow their progress on the Code for Change blog. We will be working closely with Wes, Dan, Matt and Ann and hope to get many new improvements and extensions to CiviCRM via this program.

Based on some conversations on IRC with Marshall from Ideal Solutions LLC, I embarked on extending CiviCRM to allow different payment processors for different contribution/member/event pages. Our current restriction of just one payment processor for the entire system did not feel right and we had a few requests to extend this functionality. I took this opportunity to review parts of the code base that I was not familiar with and make a few improvements to CiviCRM in the process.