Howdy folks!
Today we’d like to share with you some of the exciting new features that Compuco have been working on for CiviCRM over the past year. Our product team have been hard at work and have produced a lot of new functionality we’re excited to show off. We’ll also be letting you know how you can get your hands on it!
Certificates
One of the major projects we’ve been working on this last year is implementing a full certificate generation system into CiviCRM. A much requested feature, our team put a lot of effort into this one and we’re happy to announce that it is now created and works across memberships, cases and events.
This leverages the CiviCRM message templates and creates a URL from which a user can download a personalised certificate should they meet the admin configured criteria.
For example, this might be when they have attended an event, have a current membership or perhaps had a case set to a completed status (i.e. if they have completed an application of some form).
This is fully configurable by Civi Admins. You will have the power to decide when a certificate is generated, plus be able to design your own custom templates that can make use of tokens - populating your certificate automatically with data from your CRM.
Using tokens you can also have a link to certificates in your scheduled emails - meaning the goal of automating distribution has been ticked off.
We’ve also added APIs for all of the above, so with a bit of development effort can expose both the list of available certificates for a user and also the links to those certificates. You can see this implemented in the CiviPlus self service portal for example:
You can download it from the git repository here.
Membership extras upgraded
We’ve talked about the Membership Extras extension a lot of times before. If you’re a membership organisation and not using this functionality, you’re missing out on a significant expansion of CiviCRM’s core membership functions.
Last year we did some major work on payments and your ability to schedule them. We’ve been doing even more work this year, giving you even greater choice in how you can set up your membership plans. Some of the highlights:
- You can now create memberships that have an initial period of more than one year, and the system will automatically calculate the correct number of instalments for annual, quarterly and monthly schedules
- Members can choose which day of the month they wish to pay their fees
We’re still working on more features, revolving around subscription management, letting members have greater flexibility around upgrades, add-ons and downgrades. Be sure to keep an eye out for these features when we release them!
You can find the extension here.
Bonus - member only events
This extension has been around for a couple of years now, but it’s well worth mentioning in case you’re not aware about it! We’ve also recently performed some improvements that make it even more useful.
This extension allows you to restrict event registration to be exclusive to either contacts with a membership in good standing or simply restrict it to specific contacts in your database.
While this is obviously incredibly useful for membership organisations, it also has broader uses. You could restrict registration to just internal staff, a list of major donors or any other groups you have configured within CiviCRM.
You can also decide whether, for contacts who do not have access, the event registration form will redirect users to login, or can direct them to a signup form for membership or any other link.
With CiviPlus for example, we have a nice “login or register” block, where a user can simply enter their email address and the system will identify whether they can login or need to register for access.
You can download it from the git repository here.
Feeling unsure about installing extensions?
While all of us in the CiviCRM ecosystem know that it’s the community’s numerous innovations and extensions that make it such an amazing CRM, it can be a bit tricky to maintain them at times, requiring constant attention to new patches and updates.
In order to help with this, we’ve recently launched CiviPlus - a version of CiviCRM with all its core features, plus all of the extensions (and more!) that we’ve mentioned here today. CiviPlus is hosted securely in the cloud and all patches and security updates are taken care of by our team. This gives you a comprehensive Civi experience with all of the fantastic power of CiviCRM, without the need to worry about maintenance.
That’s all for now, we look forward to bringing you more news in the future!
Comments
This is pretty exciting - will it work on Joomla as well - Thanks