Blogues

The Drupal core contact module provides a no-frills way for users to email you via a simple webform. If you like that module, but would also like those form submissions to be recorded in CiviCRM, then this no-frills extension is for you.

We had a good CiviCRM meetup in Apeldoorn today, hosted by De Goede Woning. Willem Peters from qbset (http://www.qbset.nl) showed the first version of qbMobile, a native iPhone/Android app that he is developing for a specific customer.

Have you ever clicked a few zillion time on the admin interface to create a lot of groups, tags, values for a custom field... ?

Have you ever screamed having to do the same tedious tasks you did on the staging one more time on the production site?

Have you cursed the import wizard after having clicked again and again on the next button ?

It was a great gathering of people from different backgrounds showing up for the meetup. By far this was one of the biggest meetups (30+ people) that I have attended. Nice to see the growth in the SF Bay Area civi community!

These are some graphs I created from the data publically available at CiviCRM's Sourceforge.  Sourceforge provides limited data only on the release dates of a version (i.e. 3.1.5) and then the number of subsequent downloads to date but we can still interpret some useful conclusions from the data.  Dave Greenberg shared one of these graphs at CiviCon.  The data is from Mar 1, 2011 so I wanted to publish them before the data became too stale.

The first graphic is the simplest to understand - CiviCRM all versions 2.x compared to all versions 3.x.  Note that the timeframe measured in this graph is similar.  As such, we can conclude that the number of downloads for 3.x have increased about 27% compared to 2.x.

The team is excited to announce the release of third pair of betas for CiviCRM 3.4 and 4.0!

An remember - if you didn't already, make sure you read "Step up and help out" section of this blog post!

The newest versions are:

Our current support policy is to support and bug fix only the latest stable release of CiviCRM. This is primarily due to the amount of time and effort it takes to support multiple releases at the same time. As our user, integrator and developer base increases we expect this policy to change.

Both Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5 are fairly active releases with support for those releases expected to last for another 12 months or more (based on when the next version is released). However the next version of CiviCRM, v4.1, will only support Drupal 7.x and Joomla 1.6.x based on our current support policy.

We do understand that a large number of our users will still be on the older versions of Drupal and Joomla. If you are not planning to upgrade to the latest version of Drupal/Joomla, please contribute to the Make It Happen that will allow us to extend support for Drupal 6 / Joomla 1.5 for another release. This will ensure that these releases will be supported at least till Mar, 2012. Based on our current schedule, Drupal 6 / Joomla 1.5 will not be supported from Sep, 2011.

As part of the Google Grants program for non-profits, Google offers their Google Checkout service to qualifying non-profits at no-charge with no processing fees. Depending on the fees you would pay with a competing processor this represents an instant 3% jump in your organization's fundraising efforts just by using Google Checkout.

The only limitation has been recurring donations. To address this Google launched Google Subscriptions and now we need to get support into CiviCRM so we can enjoy a single free processing fee payment gateway.

A new Make it Happen iniative was launched to get this going in 4.1 or even 3.4 if we meet the campaign goal soon! A donation to this iniative will easily pay itself back by the savings in processing fees. This initiative is already 70% there with donations from Powered by Action and the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA):

    http://civicrm.org/mih#google