Blog posts by lobo

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April 5, 2011
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal, Joomla

Our current support policy is to support and bug fix only the latest stable release of CiviCRM. This is primarily due to the amount of time and effort it takes to support multiple releases at the same time. As our user, integrator and developer base increases we expect this policy to change.

Both Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5 are fairly active releases with support for those releases expected to last for another 12 months or more (based on when the next version is released). However the next version of CiviCRM, v4.1, will only support Drupal 7.x and Joomla 1.6.x based on our current support policy.

We do understand that a large number of our users will still be on the older versions of Drupal and Joomla. If you are not planning to upgrade to the latest version of Drupal/Joomla, please contribute to the Make It Happen that will allow us to extend support for Drupal 6 / Joomla 1.5 for another release. This will ensure that these releases will be supported at least till Mar, 2012. Based on our current schedule, Drupal 6 / Joomla 1.5 will not be supported from Sep, 2011.

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maart 24, 2011
By lobo Filed under CiviEvent, CiviCRM

Update: We now have sponsorship committed for 63% of this project and have started a Make-it-Happen Campaign!

 

CiviEvent is the most popular CiviCRM Component. We get a steady stream of feature requests along with quite a few patches. We were approached recently by an organization that wanted to add Reminder Emails for CiviEvent.

We had a quick online and offline conversation with them and realized that there was a fair amount of cool integration so an event administrator could schedule and send messages to event participants. Briefly the set of features would include:

Ability to schedule a mailing 'n' days before / after the event start date / end date OR on a specific date. This will allow an event admin to schedule a reminder email 7 days before the event and a thank you email 1 day after the event. Ability to decide who the recipient list is based on a combination or participant role (attendee, sponsor, volunteer) and participant status (Pending, Registered, Wait Listed, Cancelled). Ability to type the text/html message and subject or use a civicrm message template. Ability to include event information in the message as "civicrm mail tokens". Sending the event as a vevent/ical format used by exchange/gmail, so the recipient can register from within the mail
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maart 9, 2011
By lobo Filed under CiviCon

We held our second CiviCon in Chicago on Monday Mar 7, 2011 at TechNexus. We had an amazing turnout of 100+ community members. CiviCon 2011 was made possible by a great group. I'd personally like to acknowledge and thank the folks who made this possible...

Young-Jin Kim and Matthew Vincenz from emphanos for being such great hosts and coordinating a large part of the logistics for the event. Mary Kay Bianchi and SNTial Technologies for helping with the logistics of the event and sponsoring drinks and food at the after party :) The Gold sponsors: Rooty Hollow, Ninjitsu Web Development, Web Access and CivicActions The Silver and Bronze sponsors for helping make the event happen.
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maart 9, 2011
By lobo Filed under CiviCon

We just got back from Chicago where we had an eventful CiviCon 2011 on Mon, Mar 7th. We had more than 100 participants (registration, attendance sheets and name badges managed with CiviEvent) from across various parts of the US and Canada. We also had a successful sponsorship program with 4 Gold Sponsors, 5 Silver Sponsors and 10 Bronze Sponsors (managed by CiviContribute and the CiviEvent discount module). A companion blog post highlights all the wonderful women and men (and organizations) who made this event possible. Some of my personal highlights of the trip:

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februari 25, 2011
By loboFiled under

Overview and New Features in CiviCRM v3.4 / v4.0 With the release of 3.4.alpha1, a brief tour of some of the new features and changes in v3.4 / v4.0 is in order. This release had 7 successful Make It Happen Projects. We also had a record number of patches (100+) that were incorporated into this release.

v3.4 and v4.0 have the same set of CMS independent features. v3.4 supports Drupal 6.x and Joomla 1.5.x only. v4.0 supports Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6.x. v3.4 is expected to be the last release to support D6/J1.5. API v3 - The new version 3 API contains the standardisation that many of us have been hanging out for. The names of the function files and the functions have been standardised as have the inputs and outputs. There is a new wrapper function: civicrm_api( entity,action,$params ); to make it easier to call. If you have any doubt on how to use it we have developed an API explorer and code generator that is shipped with civicrm and will let you use interactive Thanks to the folks at Progressive Technology Project, we have integrated CiviCampaign with other CiviCRM components, specifically: CiviContribute, CiviMember, CiviEvent, CiviMail and CiviEngage. We've also integrated the PhoneList and WalkList CiviEngage Reports with CiviCampaign, making CiviCampaign more useful for grassroots organizing and political campaigns. We plan on extending and improving CiviCampaign in v4.1 via another Make It Happen
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januari 22, 2011
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM

Update December 20th: CiviCRM 4.1 for WordPress is currently in alpha stage. Features for this release include:

* Access all CiviCRM back-office functions as a plugin in the WordPress Dashboard. Admin, editor and author roles have full access. Granular permissioning by role is planned for a future release.

* Create online contribution pages, online event registration pages, and profiles - and include as public pages in your WordPress site (front-end).

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december 3, 2010
By lobo Filed under CiviMail, Drupal

A large organization using CiviCRM is planning to switch to using CiviMail for their broadcast email needs. This is great news for CiviMail and will take it to the next level in terms of feature set and functionality. As part of their migration, we are integrating a workflow engine into CiviMail. For this version, we will be using Drupal's rules module, thus making it Drupal specific. (if you are a joomla user and interested in sponsoring this for CiviCRM on Joomla, please contact us via email / IRC). For this project, we'll be focussed on extending the CiviMail schema to facilitate workflow. Sending a broadcast email will be split into three steps:

A user creates the email content. On creating / uploading the content, an event is triggered which informs the QA group of a new mailing The QA group verifies the mailing and works with the user to improve the mailing. Once this is done, the mailing is scheduled. This triggers another event which informs the production group that a mailing is in the queue The Production group validates the mailing and then either approves or rejects the mailing. If rejected, the mailing goes back to Step 1. If approved, the mailing enters the civimail job system where it is picked up and delivered.
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oktober 18, 2010
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal, Joomla

As we are getting ready to roll out the first alpha for CiviCRM v3.3, I figured a status update on some of the cool new features of 3.3 was in order. So without further ado, here are some of the cool new features that are part of 3.3

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september 19, 2010
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal

We just completed a CiviCRM Code Sprint in NY. A big tip of the hat to Rayogram for providing the space and coordinating the logistics, especially to Kyle Jester. Thanx to Chang and Matt from emotive LLC for providing breakfast and lunch during the sprint.

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augustus 20, 2010
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal, Joomla
After what seems to be an incredibly long time, we released CiviCRM v3.2 a few weeks ago to good reviews and not too many critical bug reports :). Now that is out of the way, we are starting to plan the feature set for v3.3 We've been fortunate to get a grant from Open Society Institute to help add some features important for Human Right Organizations, specifically for Front Line. We've been working with Front Line for a few years and this grant allows us to target their needs more effectively. Some of the features that are included in this grant are: Extending Address inheritance from Organization to an Individual (or from any contact to any other contact - TBD). Building Advanced Reports and Dashlets for Human Rights Organizations First version of Logging
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