Blogs

This was my first CiviCon.  I missed the chance last year.  It was great to meet all the people I have chatted with on the forums and IRC over the last couple of years -- finally.  I was gratified to be part of the sessions here.  I presented a UI Customization session with Jim from Rooty Hollow; I shared a couple of case studies along with Gregory from CivicActions.  Chatting with Lobo, Dave G, Kurund, Ninjitsu Matt and Deepak was fun and interesting.

During CiviCon I reflected both privately and publically about my first introduction to CiviCRM in '08.   I've gone from a 'noob in the forums asking dumb questions to someone who knows a little about a lot - but who still knows I have a lot more to know.  My personal story about the open-source CiviCRM community is a story of cautious enthusiasm, warm welcomes, giving back, and eventual understanding.  I took a leap of faith but it turned out well for me.  I encourage others to try the same approach.

A lot more that I thought, I found out at a I recent demo of CiviCRM at Simplify ICT, an event hosted in east London to boost the profile of free and open source software at non-profits.

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.

It's been a while since CiviCRM 3.3 went stable and the world around changed a bit: Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6 were released. Since making CiviCRM work with new versions of these two CMSes required some backwards incompatible changes, we're releasing two versions of CiviCRM:

Please remember this is an ALPHA release and it should NOT be used on production sites - however, we enourage you to install it on your test sites and let us know about any bugs or problems.

There are a few public sandboxes where you can try one (or many) of above versions:

We have set a date for the next CiviCRM BeNeLux meetup: Friday 15 April 2011 in the afternoon. More details will follow, but we do expect a demo of the CiviCRM Mobile app (Android and iPhone) from qbSet. 

We will also present the new feature on the upcoming 3.4 and 4.0 versions. If there is enough interest, we will focus on the new API v3.

Erik

We are excited to announce the publication of Using CiviCRM, by Packt Publishing – the first full-length, commercially published book covering implementation, configuration, and usage of CiviCRM.

Many non-profits live and die by the grant money that they are able to bring in. CiviCRM can currently track incoming grant applications through CiviGrant, but there is no way to track outgoing grants applications.

We had a lively meetup at Wikimedia Foundation HQ in San Francisco last week with a nice turnout (around 15 folks), despite the super crummy weather (again :-( ). Jackie Downing, Development and Communications Manager at the Gay-Straight Alliance Network shared their experiences implementing and using CiviCRM and Drupal. GSA Network empowers youth activists to fight homophobia in schools. If you've heard of the Make it Better Project - you've seen some of the great work they are doing.

The first CiviCRM user group meeting of 2011 took place on Thursday 10th Feb at the Create Centre in Bristol, the first in a while, but with several more programmed in for the coming year to attempt to make it more of a fixture in the UK CiviCRM community.