Blogs

I spent last Thursday and Friday at the Open Source CMS Conference (OSCMS 2007) - hosted by Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. It was a high-energy gathering of smart folks who are passionate about software and open source - with an especially large concentration of Drupal developers and integrators. CiviCRM Session Gregory Heller from CivicActions joined me in presenting a session on CiviCRM on Friday morning. Despite the fact that we were scheduled opposite Dries Butaert (Drupal founder) - we had a good showing. I gave folks an overview of CiviCRM - with an emphasis on CMS integration approaches (profiles, user registration, APIs and hooks). Then Greg showed off live examples of each of these techniques on some of the cool sites that CivicActions has developed using CiviCRM.

We are excited to announce that our 1.7 Beta release is now available for download. This release features the new CiviEvent component, which provides integrated event registration and management, along with a new "Contact Dashboard" which gives constituents a consolidated view of their subscriptions, contributions,event registrations and more.

Other release highlights include: Create and save re-usable email templates (with mail-merge tokens) CiviContribute plugins for Authorize.net and Google Checkout Use customized versions of templates for any screen One-click copying for existing Profiles, Contribution Pages and Events

We've integrated support for Google Checkout in CiviCRM v1.7. This was primarily on the initiative and lead of Deepak, part of our awesome India developement team. This also allowed us to compare the ease of use and integration between the two transaction providers. Here are some things we found: PayPal has a much richer and more well thought out SDK. They do quite a few things right from a developers perspective, primarily allowing the code to set various defaults (like the return url) Have the Google Checkout folks tried to use the sandbox with the awful "sandbox" background that they use. Makes it fairly hard to read and navigate the site

Rob Thorne from Torenware networks just announced the release of CiviVoter and Canvasser on the CiviCRM Mailing list (link to e-mail ). The Green Party of Canada sponsored this work and has released it under the Academic Free License v3.0. This is a pretty important component for political parties and we'd like to get a fair amount of feedback and review from the community. A future version of this component will be included in CiviCRM.

The nice thing about developing software is that the work is never done. There are so many cool things that we can do to make CiviCRM a better application. I've been having some pretty good conversations with David Strauss of Four Kitchen Studios on our IRC channel (#civicrm at irc.freenode.net). Four Kitchen Studios has been a great resource for CiviCRM and were instrumental in deploying CiviCRM within Wikipedia. In the recent past, David has initiated the de-dupe and contact merge algorithm which we hope to incorporate in CiviCRM v1.8.

Some of the various things that we hope to be part of v2.0. We will use a fair amount of the design and code from the v1.x series, but at the same time make significant changes when needed.

CiviCRM v1.7 is proceeding at a good pace. We've closed most of the issues with just a couple that are still open. We've also got a public sandbox that the community can use and test out various features of v1.7. Hopefully this will also allow us to collect a few more bug reports and issues. We definitely would like to see the community step up and play a more crucial role with testing the product before the beta and final release.

If things continue at this pace, I suspect we'll push out a beta candidate mid next week. At that point, we'll also switch demo to using CiviCRM v1.7 and make v1.7 the default download. In the past this has enabled us to catch a few more issues before we do a final release.

Came across this on digg today:

How Open Source Projects Survive Poisionous People (and you can too). If you are interested in open source development, building and fostering a developer community, this video is definitely worth watching. We in CiviCRM land can learn quite a few things from this video. I dont think this is a problem with CiviCRM land currently, but its nice to hear about some tips on how to structure email conversations etc. I think we have a really awesome community and the video has some good tips on managing a project etc

We launched the 1.7 alpha sandbox this weekend. The site is designed to allow community members and developers to explore the new features in the 1.7 release and help us identify bugs in the release prior to the Beta launch (current 1.7 release schedule). Pounding on the sandbox will help enormously in improving the quality of the beta and final releases - so if you're interested in using the new features in 1.7 and contributing to CiviCRM - this is a great way to help.

I've installed and am running Zend Platform 3.0.0 on my MacBook. I'm quite pleased with the stability and reliability of the platform. have not done any major testing regarding the speed increase, but I suspect its not noticeable since the machine is not very loaded and already quite responsive

Zend has introduced a new developer license scheme, where you can run Zend Platform for free on your development box. This is quite good for us since we dont have to pay for it. However there are two minor things that are annoying:

I've been spending the past few days with Eclipse and BIRT. Their examples and screencasts are quite valuable to understanding a fairly complex application. I suspect this model of documentation is quite applicable to CiviCRM also.

I'm making pretty good progress with CiviReport and currently have a BIRT library with various reports that can be distributed. I'm focusing on CiviContribute for the initial set of reports, but it is quite easy to adapt the reports to CiviMember and CiviEvent. BIRT allows you to have drill down reports (i.e. from a high level report, you can get more detailed reports on various aspects by drilling down a level or two). Thus a top level contribution report could give you breakdown by year, state and your top 5 donors. You can then drill down into details for each year, or state or a more detailed contribution report on a donor.