San Francisco Baykeeper's case study of moving from Blackbaud Raiser's Edge to CiviCRM was the featured topic at this month's San Francisco meetup. I previously wrote about our transition in this blog and wanted to provide an up-to-date look at that process, plus our latest advances and ongoing challenges. Baykeeper has now been successfully using CiviCRM for almost a year.
There were around 15 people at the meetup, and we had a lively discussion with lots of Q and A during the presentation.
Blogues
Restez à l'affut des dernières nouvelles de CiviCRM avec les billets de blogue de développeurs et d'utilisateurs de partout dans le monde.
Join us on 19 October 2011 in Montreal (QC, Canada) for a meetup on the state of the fr_CA CiviCRM translation. Location: at the Brulerie Saint-Denis (near the Berri-UQAM metro station) starting at 19h (7 PM).
Texting - sending short messages via sms to cell phones is a powerful but untapped tool for community organizing. Recent Pew Internet studies have shown that young people of color use texting far more than other demographic groups, and increasingly access the internet and communicate solely through their mobile devices. Given this, texting has tremendous potential to help community organizing groups in the US communicate with their members.
There will be a CiviCRM Euro code sprint in The Netherlands from 12 - 16 December 2011, and you can register here
The idea is to have as many community members present so we can achieve lots and make all of us happy!
For Joomla users out there, you may be interested in a few new and updated 3rd party extensions that provide integration with CiviCRM. A semi-complete list of available extensions with their descriptions can be found here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Joomla%21+Extensions+for+CiviCRM+%283rd+party%29
Of particular interest are a few for Joomla 1.6+ users:
CiviCRM 3.4.x and 4.0.x introduced API v3, a more consistent set of interfaces for integrating with CiviCRM using PHP, Smarty, Javascript, and REST. Building on this consistent core API, recent CiviCRM updates have introduced even more ways to manipulate your data -- such as chaining and CSV batch importing.
Thus, functions implemented according to the API v3 conventions can be invoked several different ways. If you would like to leverage this infrastructure for use with a new or customized API call, then download the latest release. With 3.4.6/4.0.6, external developers can expose API functions for new entities, new actions, and even generic actions.
As a freelancer, here are a few notes and an overview on how I solved a client's contacts consolidation when the data came from external sources:
My Use Case - Client had ongoing events and conferences over several years which meant there were databases and mailing lists all over the place (many of which had crossover). - I set up ongoing JSON exports of the contact data from the external sites, which could be queried by date range to get the latest changes.
The team is excited to announce the release of 3.4.6 and 4.0.6. This point release includes several exciting new "Make-it-Happen" features, along with 170+ bug fixes and minor improvements.. The new features include: Membership Price Sets - Does your organization have national, regional and local chapter memberships? Now you can offer self-service online membership signup and renewal for multiple memberships on the same online contribution page. Recurring Contributions and Auto-renewing Memberships with Google Checkout Previous / Next Navigation for Search Results - Now you can easily move through the contact summary pages within a set of search results! Just click the Next and Previous buttons.
Big round of applause to all the individual and organizations that helped MAKE-IT-HAPPEN for these features, including: International Mountain Biking Association, International Society for Bayesian Analysis, NSW Greens, Fuzion, Lighthouse Consulting and Web Design, New York State Senate, Powered by Action, Carmi Weinzweig, and Henry Bennett!
CiviCRM 3.3 introduced a new hook that allows you to interact with and alter dedupe queries. Unfortunately, it was something of a "hidden hook" as it lacked documentation for quite a while. But it can be quite useful and powerful, and thus deserving of a review.
If you are using Drupal 6, you have a vested interest in extended Drupal 6 support for CiviCRM 3.4 until spring 2012. If you are staying with Drupal 6 because of budgetary reasons or because Drupal 7 doesn't yet support all the modules you need for your site, this is vital for you. You will make sure your 3.4 CiviCRM/Drupal 6 setup remains healthy and safe.
Please donate here, if you haven't already.
