At our last big sprint there was some good discussion about ways to clarify the filtering conventions used on many of the search forms. One specific area that seemed to need "help" is the set of checkboxes for filtering on Pay Later, Recurring and Test contributions. Here's the current version of that section of the form:
CiviCRM 4.1.3 has been released and is available for immediate download from SourceForge. This is a security release which addresses several potential vulnerabilities. We recommend that you upgrade as soon as possible.
Following on our wonderful CiviCon day in Berkeley, several CiviCRM "evangelists" arrived at the Hilton Hotel in downtown San Francisco to help spread the word about Civi at NTEN's annual conference. Kurund and I arrived about 30 minutes before our morning session - "Is CiviCRM Right for Your Organization". The hotel was buzzing with non-profit technologists and vendors - lots of flashy signage for the large proprietary software vendors of course. But more importantly lots of folks who work in the incredible array of non-profits that belong to NTEN - networking, sharing, learning, looking for ways to help make their organizations work more effectively.
Several folks from consultancies that implement CiviCRM came to the session to help answer questions and showcase Civi projects - Frank Gomez and Michael Daryabeygi from Gingko Street Labs, Lisa Rau and Ashma Shrestha from Confluence, and Andrew Hunt from AGH Strategies.
Batch entry of gifts (checks, cash, etc.) is a much requested "missing feature" in CiviCRM. Thanks to a generous sponsorship commitment from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we are about to launch a Make-it-Happen campaign to implement this feature for the next release (4.2). We've spent some time discussing requirements with folks at EFF and several other organizations, and we've reviewed analogous functionality offered by several of the proprietary donor management products. The purpose of this post is to share the draft specifications for the feature and solicit feedback from others in the community.
OverviewThe goal is to provide a streamlined interface for data entry of batches of contributions and membership payments. A simple batching concept will be introduced to provide verification of count and totals. The feature will use a grid-style input form with the columns controlled by a selected profile. This will allow sites to add or remove non-required fields in the grid (e.g. add custom contribution fields, add or exclude premium fields etc.). The current plan is to have a separate flow / input grid for batch entry of contributions vs. membership signup / renewal payments. This will help reduce the number of columns required for each type of input.
Thanks to a successful Make-it-Happen campaign the 4.1 release comes with a much improved and super flexible approach for running Civi's critical back-ground processing tasks. These tasks include keeping membership statuses up to date and sending renewal reminders, sending scheduled CiviMail mailings, sending pledge payment reminders, and more. I've spent the past 10 days testing and documenting the new "consolidated cron" functionality, and the good news is that I think it fulfills the promise of providing a convenient and friendly way to administer and run all the required tasks for a site.
The "bad" news is that these improvements are NOT backward compatible. The set of PHP scripts which were previously used to run these tasks have all been deprecated (and moved to a 'deprecated' directory). This means that all CiviCRM-related cron jobs will stop working as soon as any site is upgraded to 4.1. (Yes, a loud warning will appear on the screen at the end of the upgrade process.)
For those of you who are thinking about ways you can promote your business as well as help support and grow the CiviCRM community :-) ...
Over the past few years the administration menu has grown quite a bit. Although I use it quite often, I find that I'm sometimes unsure where to look for a particular configuration option. We've heard the same comments from both experienced and new users - so Xavier Dutoit and I thought it would be a good idea to take a stab at re-working the menu structure. The goals of the re-organization are:
CiviCon London is only 1 week away which means it's time to draft a "State of the Project" presentation for the opening session. It's a good time to look up from our computer screens so we can think about and discuss goals for the next few years.
For all you "customizers" out there - I wanted to highlight a cool new feature that is available as of the 3.4.3 / 4.0.3 release. You can now append jQuery functions, Smarty code, HTML (really anything) to any template without having to create a customized copy of the entire file. Wow - you say, "how the h?!# do I do that?"
All you need to do is put your "extra stuff" in a new file and save it as template_to_append_to.extra.tpl.
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.
