The past week was quite interesting and generated a fair amount of traffic and news about CiviCRM. It compelled me to summarize and link to the various blog posts :)
Blogues
Restez à l'affut des dernières nouvelles de CiviCRM avec les billets de blogue de développeurs et d'utilisateurs de partout dans le monde.
I think that here in the UK, we're missing out on something. Ideally I would like to have a central place to communicate and support each other with civicrm. Hopefully this will help organise meet ups and other events in the same timezone.
I have set up a provisional group at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/civicrmuk/ if you could join up and start the ball rolling.
I'm putting this together to help the next version of civicrm. We needed a waiting list for events once they are full. Our needs will perhaps differ from a generic version but you have to start somewhere.
We started by detecting the state of the event with eventFull(). If it's full and the user is not already a participant OR in the waitinglist table, we give them a simple link which will add them to the waitinglist table.
After more than 5 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 2.2 Stable. You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our public demo site.
2.2 features a number of exciting new features, including...
Personal Campaign Pages - add donors and constituents to your fundraising team
Soft Credits for contributions
CiviCase - Case management for human service providers (with thanks to Physician Health Program - British Columbia)
Simplified configuration option for CiviMail
Allow multiple custom field values for a given contact (e.g. "List the schools you attended, degrees earned and graduation dates")
Powerful new hooks for integrators and developers who need to extend and customize existing features
.... and 400+ additional improvements and bug fixes
You can find Release Highlights here.
A big round of applause is due to all the folks who downloaded, tested and submitted bug reports during the 2.2 release cycle. The alpha and beta packages were downloaded more than 4,000 times . Several hundred bugs and "improvements" were reported by community members and fixed by the team during the release cycle.
The documentation for CiviCRM 2.2 is up and so are the new docs for CiviMail Installation, including a sub-page on CiviMail Processor.
Along with the introduction of CiviMail Processor as the new supported return email hander, we’ve made three changes that are relevant for third-party CiviMail developers in CiviCRM 2.2.
Unified email formats
Thanks to the invitation from Joomla! and their kind sharing of the precious student slots, CiviCRM was able to participate in last year’s Google Summer of Code, with the GSoC project adding multilingual support to CiviCRM.
Together with releasing beta 4 of CiviCRM, we introduced first version of new documentation layout. It's been a while since our docs came through major overhaul and it was high time to start doing something about this.
The fourth BETA release of version 2.2 - including CiviCase, Personal Campaign Pages, Soft Credits, Multi-value Custom Fields, cool new hooks for developers, and more - is now available for download. This release includes approximately 25 bug fixes. as well as some community-requested improvements: Allow a user to register multiple participants using the same email address, and allow additional participants to be added without requiring email addresses for them. Make it easier to explore CiviCase by including sample case types with configuration files in the codebase distribution (learn more...). You can also try out these sample case types - "Housing Support" and "Adult Day Care Referral" on the public 2.2 demo. Configuration option to "turn off" the double-opt-in process when users subscribe to a mailing list via a Profile form. Ability to Send Bulk Email from the Find Members search screen. New hook to discount event fees when a user is registering multiple participants (e.g. you get a 5% discount for each additional person you register). Option to completely replace CiviCRM dashboard content using the Dashboard hook. You can use the automated upgrade script to upgrade from 2.1.x OR from any previous 2.2 alpha or beta release. This release will be fully upgrade-able to any additional beta versions as well as 2.2 stable. Please help ensure a quality stable release by downloading and testing 2.2 beta against a copy of your site and data.
... If this is your first look at 2.2, check out the 2.2 Roadmap for a good overview. Or you can review a compete listing of new features, improvements and bug fixes on the issue tracker.
We plan to make usability / UI improvements a major focus of the 2.3 release. We will be working on and putting up prototypes and mockups of many of these changes over the coming weeks - and will be looking for folks to give us feedback on them.
One area we're looking at is the "selectors" - lists of records - which appear throughout CiviCRM. These are used to list search results (lists of contacts, contributions, etc.) and many other records (profile fields, activity types, etc.). Currently a big part of the horizontal space for these is taken up by "action links" - Edit, View, Delete, Disable, etc. This can cause horizontal scrolling and limits the number of columns we can show / include in each row.
We've developed an alternate approach for this - where there is a single "action icon" on each row. Clicking on it gives you a list of available actions. You can see this approach here on our new trunk sandbox (where we will be showcasing lots more changes and "experiments" going forward):
Profile Listings
Please take a few minutes to try this out and give us your feedback / thoughts on this. Will it be helpful or confusing for users?
NOTE: For this "review" please just focus on the Profile listings in the main section of the page. Don't worry about the input box and "bar" above the page header - we're working on something else which we'll put forward in a separate blog.
Update:
Based on feedback we made few changes to Action link UI
Profile Listings
We have also implemented context menu for Contact Selector. So when you right click on contact selector rows, we show menu with commonly used actions.
Contact Search
