Blogs

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It had to happen sooner or later - CiviCRM is growing with with variety of functionality, where people can plug in their own, custom pieces and make CiviCRM more tailored to their needs. Most prominent examples at the moment include payment processors, custom searches and custom reports. Don't confuse it with "larger scale" customisation, like writing Drupal modules which - using API and hooks - modify CiviCRM behaviour. We're talking about well defined, self-contained pieces of code which throw in some useful functionality into your existing installation. As of now, it's a bit of a hassle to install them - you need to put files in proper places, register them using administrator section and so on: nothing extremely complicated, but also definitely not the easiest part of CiviCRM setup and configuration. More to that, some very useful extensions (like some payment processors) are shipped with vanilla CiviCRM, but not supported by core team, some  of them are not shipped, but available only from forums or issue tracker. In general - you can find a lot of useful things, it's just requires some effort.

I'm pleased to announce that the target for the first of the Civi-Make-it-Happen initiatives has been reached. We have raised $750 to fund enhancing the dedupe functionality to merge CMS user accounts when de-duping. Those of us who are familiar with the experience of clicking on each contact to see which one has a userID before clicking merge will be pleased to see this enhancement and grateful to those who donated.

Over the last year rayogram has worked with the New York State Senate to deploy a customized version of CiviCRM 3.2 for each Senate office. In the course of this work, we developed a custom theme for NYSS that leverages much of the template work that we did for the CiviCRM 3.2.

At September's meetup Kyle Jaster from Rayogram presented the newly released SimplyCivi Drupal theme, designed as a cleaner, more useful and user-friendly administration theme for CiviCRM.

We just released CiviCRM 3.2.3 – it is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site.

Sometimes I get frustrated with CiviCRM. For all the great features there are problems / limitations that we seem to keep hitting. So, if lots of people want the same things added / fixed why aren’t they being fixed?

We have been looking at whether it is a good idea to use households and thought I would pull together the various things that have been written about households into a bit of a 'where are they at'.