Blogs

About 8 weeks ago we began looking into a CiviCRM / QuickBooks integration framework. Our goal is to write a module that allows CiviCRM contributions and contact information to be written to QuickBooks. Our target version is QuickBooks 2009 Premier Non-Profit edition, since that's what we use.

At the very least, the module should be able to:

A problem with using Civi for a members’ website based on Joomla is the need to be able to control access for different types of user – for example you might want ordinary members to be able to edit their own details but not see the details of other members for privacy reasons. But perhaps some groups of members might want to see each others details.

UPDATE: Please refer to more recent blog post to find out about more CiviCRM related Mozilla Service Week activities! Mozilla Service Week is coming up in just one month - September 14 to 21, 2009! The driving force behind this event is a strong belief that everyone should know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a great experience when they're online. During those 7 days you are encouraged to share, give, engage, create, and collaborate by offering your time and talent to local organizations to make their Internet use easier and more effective. CiviCRM, among others, became a partner of this initiative.

I've been offline for a week, so a bit of delay in continuing this discussion on Invoicing and Accounting Integration. I thought it would be helpful to jump in with a quick review / reminder of existing functionality and data structures and some thoughts about what's missing based on my understanding "so far".

With every release, we're getting more and more support from the community. It definitely makes us happy and proud to see the adoption of CiviCRM growing. With 3.0 release, we would like to both encourage even more participation and say thank you to most active community contributors. Therefore, we're announcing Top Bug Hunter/Huntress Challenge in 3.0 release cycle! What do you need to do to participate? It's quite simple - just help us test CiviCRM 3.0 while it's in alpha and beta stage. You can do it in following ways: Log in to CiviCRM 3.0 public sandbox and try out your favourite features. If you find a problem, please report it on the appropriate board of our forum. Please remember to include clear description of the problem, steps to reproduce it, potentially error message or traceback information. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset. Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 3.0 - let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you've done this, play around with your favourite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 3.0 alpha testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers! Go through the CiviCRM 3.0 Documentation, help us improve it and make it relevant to upcoming version before we reach beta state (estimated 3 weeks). It's a wiki, so after creating an account, you can fix problems and add missing information. If you're a developer and have PHP skills, you can submit a patch through our issue tracker. Just create an issue, attaching a patch file that fixes a problem you've discovered in the CiviCRM 3.0 codebase. We will be monitoring activity on the forum and in issues tracker over next few weeks. After we release CiviCRM 3.0 stable (which is planned to happen in around 4-6 weeks), core team members will evaluate community members activities and pick the most active person. The winner will be awarded with iPod touch 8 GB, with special dedication engraved on it. Another 4 most active people will win special CiviCRM t-shirts. Please take into consideration, that these t-shirts will be the first ones produced by the project and will definitely become a priceless collectible one day, when CiviCRM is The Open Source Solution for Non-profit Sector (even more than it's now). ;-) So - test away, see you on forums and in issue tracker! :-)

I've been working on customizing CiviCRM for my kids school. I documented how i exposed relationship information on a profile view in this blog post. In the past week i've also exposed "activities" and "a multiple record custom group" via profiles which i'll describe in this blog post. All this work was done via civicrm hooks and custom templates and run on CiviCRM v2.2.8.

We’re happy to announce that CiviCRM 3.0.alpha2 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it’s an alpha release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites. Check out the blog entry on the previous alpha1 release for a run-down of what’s new in CiviCRM 3.0, and this list for issues that were fixed since 3.0.alpha1. A full list of changes, improvements and bug fixes in this release is also available on the wiki and in the issue tracker.

A warning to CiviCRM Standalone users: Don't upgrade to PHP 5.3.0 just yet. It removes deprecated behavior that the OpenID library relies on. That means you won't be able to login if you upgrade to 5.3.0+. Going back to PHP 5.2.x fixes the issue.

I wasn't really sure when I wrote my first blog on accounts and CiviCRM whether it was a topic that would draw much interest but in fact I got a lot of really thoughtful comments and something of a blogathon took place. I have some ambition to write another piece summing up what I think has come out of the discussion - but in the meantime I want to pick up now on something Dave & I have talked about a little bit on the forums: invoice numbers.