Blogues

This week Jaap and me were working on the first CiviRules sprint, funded by MAF Norge. As you have problably read (and if not you should :-) in Jaap's earlier blog post he has been working on API's to send Emails, SMS and PDF letters. In the meantime I have created a first database scheme for CiviRules, hacked some basic DAO's and BAO's together and started working on the first forms. Preview of the screen included :-)

At Ginkgo Street Labs, we’re on a mission to improve CiviCRM to better meet users’ growing and changing needs. We have many ways that we gather data on those needs, most recently through the CiviVolunteer Survey, in which we asked how organizations are managing their volunteer programs. To encourage participation in the survey, we raffled four $25 Amazon gift certificates.

This week we have been working for MAF Norway to automate the sending of SMS, E-mail and PDF creation. What we have done in the past for them is that we created a Trigger/Action module to automate their donor journeys. The actions in the trigger/action module are API calls. But what was missing up-to-today was to functionality to send e-mail, or to create a PDF Letter or send an SMS by invoking an API Call.

Due to circumstances beyond their control related to their previous hosting provider, PACH was recently forced to find a new host for their Joomla website and CiviCRM. In addition, PACH has one volunteer in charge of CiviCRM which manages more than 450 volunteers and supporter contacts. They recognized the need for a solid support team in the event that this volunteer becomes unavailable or is unable to resolve an issue. They had asked several CiviCRM providers, but it was difficult to find one that could host and support Joomla, until they found Cividesk.

The team is super excited to announce that the second alpha release of CiviCRM 4.6 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.6 sandbox site!

If you've been following the CiviCRM blog, you probably noticed the reports from Google Summer of Code 2014: Siddhant Rajagopalan built a new CiviMail composition screen, and Aditya Nambiar built an A/B testing system.

The team is super excited to announce that the first alpha release of CiviCRM 4.6 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.6 sandbox site!

One of the 'features' of CiviCRM that has been an ongoing source of contention among our customers has been what happens when expired memberships are renewed. The current behaviour is that the existing expired membership has it's end date extended and the start date is altered to reflect the start of the latest membership period. This is great for figuring out when someone first became a member way back when. But, it makes it very hard to see breaks in their membership.

Is your New Year’s resolution to shape up your CiviCRM skills?  Learn how to better utilize CiviCRM by participating in these on-line classes taught by Cividesk.  All classes are two hours in length and designed for the new user, however many current users find the courses helpful to complete their knowledge in a particular area of the CRM. Each course focues on a different topic: Contacts, Membership, Events and Contribution management.