Blogues

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.

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!!!).

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.

This month we did a fairly complex migration for a customer of about 90,000 contacts to CiviCRM. I have been using Migrate module to do migrations for a while now but this time for the first time I used version 2 of the migrate module. I put up a how-to-blog on our site just before Christmans but Fen has inspired me to get on with sharing it more widely.

Similar to @annaleevk's story (Tales from a Blackbaud Kintera Conversion) earlier this year I was tasked with migrating a 60K contact Kintera database to CiviCRM.  To make matters more "interesting", the client had a home-grown database with mixed information, some defining new contacts and some adding information to the Kintera contacts.  I will not talk about thi

This time of year I would normally be entring data from hundreds of sheets of paper, struggling to read people's sloppy handwriting and feeling like I was a slave to our database. But instead, I'm viewing reports on phone calls, pledges and donations, generating reminders and thank-yous -- with no data entry required!