Blogs

Those of you who have been following our blog already know that we are currently working on a CiviMail focused release. Some of the exciting items to be included are:

We have started a new list to talk about extensions to CiviCRM to handle the constituent, donor and membership management aspects of open source foundations. You can sign up for the list here. One of the main goals of this project is to enable integration with LedgerSMB, an open source accounting package.

Hi CCRM Friends,

My name is Shane Hill. Some of you may have read my name in a few places or on some lists. This post is meant to introduce me and give some background. I am with the organization The Urban Alliance For Sustainability. http://www.uas.coop and we use CiviCRM to manage our constituency and send email blasts. At first, I was just a volunteer with UAS as I believed in their mission (now my mission) and I wanted to lend my experience to what they were (are) doing. Then in time I inherited their web operations which eventually led to having to deal with CiviMail. :)

Thanks to UAS’s Shane Hill’s impressive recent CiviMail improvements (currently, among others, an order of magnitute speed-up in email generation…) and the forthcoming changes for DA, we decided to make a separate CiviCRM release consisting of CiviCRM 1.8 and the improved CiviMail. The release will be called CiviCRM 1.9 and is developed on the v1.9 branch in our Subversion repository.

One of our community members, Mari Tilos, has started doing screencasts for CiviCRM. This is a big step forward and helps with the documentation process significantly. The initial set of screencasts is at here. The initial set covers Import, Relationships and Custom Data. Once we have a good process going, we will start linking the screencast with the appropriate documentation pages.

We've had captcha support for some time in CiviCRM. This is not a very popular feature since getting it to work properly is not trivial (you need the right PHP libraries and the path to the a ttf font on your server)

This post by Gordon Heydon, pushed me to investigate ReCAPTCHA, which has a cool tagline: Stop Spam, Read Books. I've seen a few sites in the recent past that have been powered by ReCAPTCHA.

We need someone who has used and is familiar with CiviCRM to give an introduction to CiviCRM at Drupal Camp LA. The forum post from the camp organizer is here.

From the forum post:

Looking for a CiviCRM speaker for DrupalCampLA on Sept 8 & 9th, 2007. There are many Drupal users who avoid using CiviCRM because of the perceived learning curve. If you can lead a discussion on CiviCRM for DrupalCampLA, please sign-up at http://barcamp.org/DrupalCampLASessions.