We've just started a make it happen for UK direct debit integration - something that lots of UK non profits have been asking for and we are happy to provide :)
The fabulous Eileen will be carrying out the work and we are aiming to raise the total amount needed by August 15 in time for her trip to the UK so we can spend some time kick starting it all.
At the last user and admin training in London we decided to create exercise books to accompany the training. The idea was to move from an online format to a printed format, and we used the same tool that we use to create 'CiviCRM: a comprehensive guide': Booki.
We are super pleased to annouce CiviCRM developer and implementor training in London this May 18th and 19th in partnership with the CiviCRM core team.
We're very pleased to annouce that CiviCon is coming to London this August 22nd.
In the grand tradition of CiviCons, we've timed this one to co-incide with DrupalCon London (though we haven't gone quite as mad as they have with UK branding cliches).
A lot more that I thought, I found out at a I recent demo of CiviCRM at Simplify ICT, an event hosted in east London to boost the profile of free and open source software at non-profits.
At the recent CiviCRM code sprint in Bristol I worked on developing integration between MaPit (a web service that maps postcodes and points to administrative area information for the UK) and CiviCRM.
Great news for CivICRM users in the UK. CiviCRM now comes with 'out of the box' support for Gift Aid. The code is freely available for download, installation (instructions here) and use on your site.
A quick look the book CiviCRM a comprehensive guide: how we got here, and our plans for the future
We recently got fifty copies of CiviCRM: a comprehensive guide printed on demand for some training events in the UK. Being able to hand out a 300 page book as a supplement to the training went down really well with participants: holding something in your hands in a world which is predominantly online world is quite reassuring, it seems!
Today at the Bristol Code sprint a few of us made a concerted effort on getting making Giftaid 'plug and play' for Civi.
Our starting point is code written by Millertech and our aim is to get it into a state that we can package it as a Drupal module. Once we've done that, we're hopeful that we'll be able to package it for Joomla also.
Tokens are used in CiviCRM to create mail merges in much the same way as, for example, Microsoft Office. They are currently implemented in (at least) four places in CIviCRM: 'CiviMail', 'Send Mail to Contacts', 'Create PDF Letter' and 'Create Mailing Labels'. Out of the box Civi comes with a decent set of tokens, including tokens for all the address fields. One thing it doesn't do is provide a token that correctly formats an address block taking account of when fields aren't present. For example, if i used the following address tokens for my address:
