Blog posts by lobo

Earlier this week we received some pretty excellent feedback from some CiviCRM users. This made our week, so we decided to share :). Erik Möller from Wikimedia Foundation writes: CiviCRM definitely is becoming the leading open source product in this space, and its growing mindshare and modular framework is helping it to support other non-profit needs as well. Wikimedia has been using CiviCRM as a fundraising backend for more than a year now after some

One of the common needs of a contribution or event registration system is to track what campaign that transaction is destined from and what link originated the transaction. This allows organizations to calculate what links / web sites / advertising / mailings are most effective and use that information to influence their current or future campaigns. Some organizations (e.g. wikimedia foundation) use a three level tracking scheme: Campaign, Appeal and Fund, while other organizations might choose to use only one tracking field.

One of the reported shortcomings of CiviCRM has been the perceived "lack of reporting functionality". This is true to a large extent, but our hope was that most folks would either use Traditional reporting solutions: BIRT, Jasper Reports and/or Crystal Reports. We demoed an integration with BIRT a few releases back, but this did not get any traction. There are a couple of larger deployments that have built custom reports using BIRT and Jasper. Views2 and CiviCRM integration. However the lack of grouping / sub-total functionality has prevented this from being a complete reporting solution. This is also a drupal only solution Custom Drupal modules / Joomla components. Quite a few folks have gone down this path, but there has not been a lot of sharing of these reports within the community Based on the success of Custom Search, we decided that shipping CiviCRM with a few good reports was a good goal for 2.3. This initiated CiviReport - The Return. The goal was to build a simple code based reporting framework that we could use to write reports fairly quickly. The same interface would be exposed so other developers could contribute their custom reports to core (in a manner similar to custom search).

The CiviCRM team is planning to hold a UK and Europe developer camp and user meetup in the last week of June 23-27 (if you are interested in attending, please do take this survey.) A couple of months ago, we decided to run CiviCRM on the civicrm.org servers. Eating your own dog food does spur quite a bit of changes and tweaks to make the product a lot more usable :). For the event in the UK, we needed to accept payment in either euros or pounds. However we do not have multi-currency support within CiviEvent :( Once again, Drupal hooks and custom templates to the rescue. I implemented two hooks, the buildForm hook to set the currency in the config object

We had a good phone meeting with the Advisory Group yesterday. We also used the CiviCRM IRC Channel as the back channel for questions and related chatter. The planned agenda and pre-meeting discussion is documented on this wiki page. Dave Greenberg did a great job facilitating the meeting. We had all 10 of the advisory group members there (go group!). Here is a brief summary of what transpired and a few action items from the meeting: Advisory Group Process Accomplish and get done at what you commit to doing for the month Attendance expectation: 2 excused absences a year (this is common with most professional groups) Term limits: 2 year term. The first group is special, since half the group will only have a 1 year term. This allows us to maintain continuity and momentum within the group Group review every 6 months The mailing list and wiki will be the main coordination tools Eat your own dog food

UPDATE: Please use the v2.2 beta downloads. The below version is now obsolete

In conjunction with some awesome folks in the Joomla core team and Elin Waring (mcsmom), we've restructured the CiviCRM install process for J! 1.5.9 in the hope of increasing the install success rate on shared hosting. There are changes to the front end (contributed by Elin) to simplify menu creation.