Blogs

Sorry for the short notice - but I just got a reminder that the deadline for submission of session suggestions for the 2010 NTC is this coming Monday (9/21). The conference is April 8-10 in Atlanta GA. Many of you have attended in the past - it's a pretty big deal at least for US non-profits. It's definitely a great opportunity for exposure and can be an awesome way to help promote CiviCRM as a project. I would encourage any of you who are interested in seeing CiviCRM related session(s) on the agenda to jump in a submit session suggestions (you can submit several): Submit session suggestions here In general, case study / success stories are well received ("Pump up your online fundraising with open source tools"). You do NOT need to volunteer to lead the session in order to suggest it (altho I suspect that helps) :-) Last years sessions that had some CiviCRM content included: Selecting and Implementing Open Source Constituent Relationship Management: Views from the Trenches with CiviCRM, MPower & SugarCRM Users. Not your Parent's Custom Application: Building Exactly What you Need on top of a Platform CRM Sewing Circle If you do submit sessions - let me know and we'll be sure to blog about them since the next step is a community voting process - and we can encourage folks in the community to vote for your sessions.

There was a thread in the forum a few weeks ago about adding generic replacements for tokens that dont have a value for a specific contact. An example is where the first name field is blank and the organization would want to substitute friend or member instead of keeping it blank. The token engine does not provide this functionality by default, however implementing it via a hook is relatively trivial.

We’re happy to announce that CiviCRM 3.0.beta4 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites. The next release could be 3.0 stable, so if you haven’t checked whether your favourite (old and new) CiviCRM features work the way you expect, it’s a very good time to do it.

The team has released version 2.2.9 today with around 13 bug fixes and improvements. Critical fixes include: Migration to a new host Standalone deadlocks with secure URLs Free event confirmation email You can review a complete list of 2.2.9 changes on the issue tracker.   Download

We've recently upgraded a copy of a 100,000+ contact install running 2.2.8 to 3.0 b3 for testing purposes. Functionality is fine and things look absolutely great in the new interface.

The upgrade was painless and quite quick. There was a foreign key drop constraint in the installer that needs tweaking, but the core team is on it and apart from that it took only about 20 minutes start to finish to upgrade the fairly good sized database.

Minutes for 09-02-2009 meeting - CRM - CiviCRM Wiki

Web redesign project

A while back, Lobo alluded to some recent modifications that allowed Joomla and Standalone users to more easily tap into CiviCRM's hooks (issue detailed here).

In Toronto consultant Alan Dixon, TechSoup Canada Program Manager Jane Zhang, and Joe Murrray of JMA Consulting will be providing CiviCRM information, training, and advice to NGOs, with a bit of friendly support from Mark Surman, the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation.

As you already know, CiviCRM is participating as a Mozilla Service Week partner. For the last few days we've been thinking about the specific shape of our contribution to this project and decided that we would like to offer consulting assistance to the community of organizations using or wanting to use CiviRM. The core team as a whole will pledge 100 hours to help organizations with CiviCRM related issues during Mozilla Service Week.