The first North of England meetup took place on the 12th of January 2012. It was really well attended with fifteen attendees. The attendess consisted of people interested in CiviCRM, users, implementers and developers. Some of these people had travelled quite a long way to get there and we were really pleased to see them.
For anyone who is using pricesets and/or automated recurring contributions with a payment processor, you will probably enjoy the 3 custom searches that you can download here
One of my favorite features in CiviCRM 4.1 is the improved support for custom tokens via hooks. It's really opened up the possibilities for building some great functionality and new workflows in CiviCRM. If you already know what tokens and hooks are, skip down to see some cool examples.
CiviCRM had a very successful year in 2011. The project grew significantly in different areas and we made progress on a few long standing issues. The biggest change in our opinion is the increase in community involvement across all aspects of the project.
We had 1 major release which supported Drupal 6, Joomla 1.5 (v3.4) and Drupal 7, Joomla 1.6 (v4.0). We also had 13 minor releases in 2011. A chart of the types of organizations using CiviCRM can be found here along with the usage of various components. We held the 2nd North America CiviCon in Chicago which was organized by Young-Jin Kim from Emphanos. The 1st CiviCon Europe was held in London and organized by Michael McAndrew, Third Sector Design and David Moreton, Circle Interactive. Each of the conferences had 100+ attendees. We also held user and developer training, and code sprints around these conferences
During the december 2011 sprint in The Netherlands we discussed a different approach to the developer training sessions. We wanted to bring the approach in line with the user and administrator training sessions developed during the sprint following CiviCon London 2011. In short this means we do not try to focus on dealing with all aspects of CiviCRM but focus more on the needs of the participants. The aim is not to learn all there is to learn but to learn enough to get started.
There are various CiviCRM events coming up in London this February, indeed there is 'something for everyone' regardless of your level of experience and familiarity with CiviCRM. If you can't make it over to the US this April, you should definitley consider participating in one or more of these events...
A couple of weeks back I wrote here some thoughts about letting users manage and modify their own private collection of reports without actually having site-wide "administer reports" privileges. I've since gone ahead and written up the code to make this happen, and I would love to get feedback from the community on its usefulness and ways to improve it.
The team is excited to announce the second beta release for 4.1 with support for Drupal 7, Drupal 6, Joomla 1.7/1.6, and the integration with Wordpress 3.3 (wohoooo!!!).
In November 2011 we worked during a hole day with Abril from AlternativasyCapacidades.org and Juan Manuel from TelarSocial.org, and their teams from Mexico to get the Mexican Spanish translation finished for CiviCRM. We did our best and despite we couldn't reach the goal, we got 90% completed. Not bad! We put together a team of volunteers, some working in our office at Wingu and one remotely from the province of Mendoza in Northwestern Argentina.
Recently we noticed the Make-It-Happen on CiviCRM.org which proposed to integrate CiviCRM with Clickatell and other SMS gateways. I approached dlobo on IRC and asked if he would be interested in seeing the code we had developed that would do some of what the MIH proposed. He asked why we hadn't mentioned it before and my sheepish response was that, even though it worked, it felt like it was a duct tape solution not ready for public consumption.
