Blogs

This is really a continuation of previous blogs on CiviCRM accounting integration. I now have some basic integration bewteen CiviCRM and Xero working and decided to do a screencast.

Screencasts are hardly my preferred medium - especially now that I've tried to make one but I thought it might be useful for people to see what a CiviCRM integration with the accounting package Xero would look like. The screencast doesn't show you any CiviCRM - just Xero and is more intended to give people an idea of what the day-to-day reality of it is.

As an extension to our implementation of CiviCRM to support my work as a state representative, we have created a voter canvassing module. It has been tested under Drupal 6.14 and Civicrm 3.01 and summarily retested under Drupal 6.15 and CiviCRM 3.03.

It is available for download at a page on my website that includes installation instructions. Please feel free to contact me at willbrownsberger at gmail.com if you would like access to my testbed to check out the application.

This release includes several COOL new features: Personal Dashboards - ** NEW in this beta release ** Each CiviCRM user can now configure their own dashboard (CiviCRM Home) to include summary data that's important to their work. Any available 'CiviReports' can be embedded in the dashboard in tabular or graphical format. Check out some examples on Kurund's recent blog post. Contact Subtypes - Extend (and / or rename) the built-in contact types and create custom fields specific to a subtype (e.g. Staff vs. Volunteer custom fields). Thanks to the folks at Alpha International for sponsoring this much-requested feature (learn more...). HTML Emails for Receipts, Event Confirmations and more - Templates for all system-generated emails are now stored in the database and editable by administrators. You can easily add styles, logos and more to your emails. HTML layout overhaul for online contribution pages - Phase 1 in efforts to make front-end CiviCRM pages much easier to style / modify via CSS (learn more...). Thanks to Kyle Jaster and the folks at rayogram.com.. Usability improvements - Streamlined DATE input and list sorting widgets. Prevent users from losing work by alerting them if they try to navigate away from a form with unsaved changes. Support for Price Sets in Online Contribution Pages - Provides the flexibility to incorporate more complex contribution options (e.g. "Contribute $25 more to receive our monthly magazine."). Custom Data Groups Extensibility - Custom data groups can now be shared between multiple types of Activities, Events, Participant Roles etc. Access Control for Reports - Access control list (ACL) based permissioning is now applied to report data.

Here’s a group posting from Alice with Progressive Technology Project, and Kyle and Sacha with Rayogram:

As we’re closer and closer to the release of CiviCRM 3.1, we began thinking what to schedule in CiviCRM 3.2. As one of the features we want to add is the ability to undelete certain CiviCRM entities, we want to discuss with the community the initial approach to undelete that we came up with – along with a sketch of logging functionality that we consider for a future release.

General Remarks