Blogues

Hi CCRM Friends,

My name is Shane Hill. Some of you may have read my name in a few places or on some lists. This post is meant to introduce me and give some background. I am with the organization The Urban Alliance For Sustainability. http://www.uas.coop and we use CiviCRM to manage our constituency and send email blasts. At first, I was just a volunteer with UAS as I believed in their mission (now my mission) and I wanted to lend my experience to what they were (are) doing. Then in time I inherited their web operations which eventually led to having to deal with CiviMail. :)

Thanks to UAS’s Shane Hill’s impressive recent CiviMail improvements (currently, among others, an order of magnitute speed-up in email generation…) and the forthcoming changes for DA, we decided to make a separate CiviCRM release consisting of CiviCRM 1.8 and the improved CiviMail. The release will be called CiviCRM 1.9 and is developed on the v1.9 branch in our Subversion repository.

One of our community members, Mari Tilos, has started doing screencasts for CiviCRM. This is a big step forward and helps with the documentation process significantly. The initial set of screencasts is at here. The initial set covers Import, Relationships and Custom Data. Once we have a good process going, we will start linking the screencast with the appropriate documentation pages.

We've had captcha support for some time in CiviCRM. This is not a very popular feature since getting it to work properly is not trivial (you need the right PHP libraries and the path to the a ttf font on your server)

This post by Gordon Heydon, pushed me to investigate ReCAPTCHA, which has a cool tagline: Stop Spam, Read Books. I've seen a few sites in the recent past that have been powered by ReCAPTCHA.

We need someone who has used and is familiar with CiviCRM to give an introduction to CiviCRM at Drupal Camp LA. The forum post from the camp organizer is here.

From the forum post:

Looking for a CiviCRM speaker for DrupalCampLA on Sept 8 & 9th, 2007. There are many Drupal users who avoid using CiviCRM because of the perceived learning curve. If you can lead a discussion on CiviCRM for DrupalCampLA, please sign-up at http://barcamp.org/DrupalCampLASessions.

CiviMail has been a component within CiviCRM since early on (v1.2 or so). However the technical hurdles to install and get CiviMail up and running are quite high and hence CiviMail did not get as much attention or user base as CiviCRM and the other components. CiviMail is an integral part of any medium-large size install and is used by a few organizations successfully. For the average user, a few things have changed in the recent past which I suspect will increase the popularity of CiviMail. Some of these changes are:

Okay, so 1.8 stable has been released - and the roadmap indicates that it includes CiviReport Phase 1. You may be wondering... How does it work? What does it do? How can I try it out? etc....

The last few weeks of a release is always quite frustrating. The team is itching to get started with new development and get on with the next version. However, users are testing the beta release and filing new issues and bugs, few tweaks need to be done etc. So overall, things are in a neither here nor there status. However, once we mark a release as stable, we move most of the development team onto the new release and things get more exciting.

We are excited to announce that our 1.8 release is now available for download, as well as testing on our demo site. We would like to thank our dedicated users for installing and testing the beta releases.

Here are a few drupal modules built and maintained by the community that seem quite useful. Thanks to all the folks who have spent time and energy maintaining and releasing these modules. Note that most of the project descriptions have been lifted from the project page on Drupal. If you have questions or bugs related to the below modules, please file them on the issue page of each module.

CiviCRM Subscribe: Allows users to subscribe (double opt-in) to a CiviCRM group without creating a Drupal user.