Blogs

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december 5, 2008

Upcoming in 2.2: Personal Campaign Pages, Soft Credits (and a question to integrators)

By michal Filed under CiviContribute, Architecture, CiviCRM

It's that time of year again!

No, not what you think. :-) It's the time of year when new a CiviCRM version is behind the door, and it has cool new features. Code freeze is going to be introduced any day now - and we'll move on to quality assurance, alphas, betas and other equally exciting stuff.

Let me briefly introduce you to two new 2.2 features: one of them already mentioned here and there - Personal Contribution Pages (PCP), and a "last minute" addition - Soft Credits.

november 30, 2008

NTEN 2008 Donor Management Software Satisfaction Survey Results

By Dave Greenberg Filed under CiviContribute, CiviPledge, CiviCRM

The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) published the results of it's first-ever Donor Management Software (DMS) Satisfaction Survey last week. Nearly 1,000 people participated in the survey - whose goal was to help nonprofits "find the DMS that is best for your organization". Regulars readers of this blog will recall that we were quite disappointed when the survey was announced - due to the fact that CiviCRM was NOT INCLUDED In the list of Donor Management Software solutions in the survey. The good news is that folks in our community stepped up nicely. Despite being a "write-in candidate" CiviCRM got the fourth highest number of respondents to the question "Please select the product that you consider your PRIMARY donor management system."

november 23, 2008

New in 2.2: Token hooks and Smarty templates for CiviMail

By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal, Joomla

CiviMail is getting another major upgrade in 2.2. Some of the features coming in 2.2 include: PHP return channel solution. This feature should enable more folks to install and run CiviMail. This will obsolete our amavisd return channel solution. No perl or sys admin / root access expertise needed any more :) Adding CiviMail as an "action" to search results. This feature will allow folks to send a mailing to a "dynamic smart group" and alleviate the need to create multiple groups just for civimail purposes. Thus if you want to send a targeted mailing to all the folks in the 94135 zip code in your "we want more green trees" group, you enter the relevant search parameters (check the group and type the zip code), do the search and invoke the "Send Bulk Email" action. You can read more about this issue here Adding token hooks and ability to send "templatized" emails. This is described in more detail below

november 20, 2008

CiviCRM 2.1.2 and CiviCRM 2.0.7 released

By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal, Joomla

CiviCRM 2.1.2 release with bug fixes, as well as a fix for a critical security vulnerability is now available for download. CiviCRM 2.0.7 a maintainance release fixing critical security vulnerabilities is also available for download. The vulnerability addressed could allow a remote user with insufficient permissions to access CiviCRM functionality via the API and / or command line scripts.

november 19, 2008

REST API updates

By acrosman Filed under CiviCRM

Over the last week or two a growing number of folks have been discussing improvements to the REST API. Several months back I wrote a small patch that opened the experimental REST interface to the whole API of the system. When that happened a few other people started to show some interest in what could be done with this new functionality.

There are a couple changes being worked on, and several more proposed for future work.

november 13, 2008

New in 2.2: State-Country widget, customizing event registration amounts for members

By lobo Filed under CiviCRM

Our global meeting resulted in some new features being added to 2.2. Our team worked on a new jQuery based country/state selector and incorporating hook(s) to the "amount" functionality of online contribution and event registration pages. I'll give a brief description of the feature set and functionality of these projects New jQuery based State Country widget Our previous widget was a dojo based combo box widget. Both the country and the state were ajax based combo boxes. The state combo box was dependent on the value chosen in the country combo box. This implementation was quite complex and not easily replicated (hence u did not see the widget in many places). For 2.2 we took a slightly different approach: The country field is a simple html select box (the values are restricted by the countries configured in the admin area). The state selector is now dynamic and refreshed with new values whenever the country is changed. We took inspiration and borrowed a fair part of the code from: Simple chained combobox plugin for jQuery.

november 11, 2008

Join Us at the 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit Next Week

By Dave Greenberg Filed under CiviCase, CiviCRM, Drupal, Joomla, Training

Looking for an opportunity to network and share expertise with other folks in the non-profit technology eco-system? The Nonprofit Dev Summit takes place in Oakland, California next week - November 17-19. Depending on attendee interest, I'm prepared to facilitate several CiviCRM-related sessions - as well as a few training modules (intro, advanced and/or developer oriented). I'm also planning on sharing a first look at the upcoming CiviCase case management module. And... there are lots of cool-sounding session on topics ranging from cloud computing to security audits and hosting. You can browse the current list of proposed sessions on the Aspiration wiki. "The 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit will be the second annual convening of people and organizations developing software tools, web applications and other technology to support social justice causes. Bringing together a diverse range of developers, technologists, managers, eRiders, integrators, users and other practitioners who self-identify under the umbrella of roles around “developing nonprofit software”, the 2008 DevSummit will provide an opportunity both to gather as a community and to take stock of the field, while building connections and capacity." It would be great to have a solid group of CiviCRM community members at this summit - so check it out and join us if you can.

november 10, 2008

Billing Information Improvements for 2.2

By Dave GreenbergFiled under

One of the mini-projects that we worked on during our San Francisco meetup / code sprint was improving the way name and address data is handled during payment transactions (e.g. online contributions, membership signup and event registration). Our goals were: Prevent name, email address and postal address information collected during a payment transaction from over-writing existing "non-billing-related" data. Store the billing name and address info for EACH transaction - so that it can be retrieved for audit / reconciliation purposes. Set a foundation for a more "shopping-cart" style interface where logged in users can select from a set of previously used billing locations.

november 9, 2008

In the thick of CiviCase pre-alpha

By Andrew Clarke Filed under CiviCase

As I've said elsewhere, it's been a real pleasure working closely with the CiviCRM team on the CiviCase project. The work we're doing is exciting, and has at least a hope of offering some efficiency to the large number of service providers whose work is organized into "cases", however that term is locally defined.

november 3, 2008

CiviCase Progress Report

By Dave Greenberg Filed under CiviCase, CiviCRM

CiviCase is a new component for CiviCRM targeted at organizations who provide case management services. It is being developed In partnership with the Physician Health Program of British Columbia (PHP-BC). In addition to providing funding for this project, PHP-BC is providing invaluable domain expertise and the current plan is for their staff to start using CiviCase in January 2009. You can learn more about how this project got started and the project goals from these blog posts and the requirements overview. CiviCase Phase 1 is a major part of the upcoming 2.2 release - and several members of the core team are gathered in San Francisco this month working on bringing it to life. Last week we had a two day "in-person" meetup with PHP-BC folks (Andrew Clarke, Claire Sauve, and Dave D) where we reviewed work in progress and got detailed feedback on the basic workflows and screens, as well as the data model and configurability of the component. That meeting resulted in some key refinements and additions to the phase 1 specification - and provided a good reality-check for the project!