Blogs

Greetings from Apeldoorn at the Netherlands CiviCRM Code Sprint. I've spent the last several months meticulously working with the fundraising team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to build donate pages that look and act beautifully, remove friction from the donation process, and leverage premiums to get bigger donations.

Extensions are a growing part of the CiviCRM way of doing things. We need to develop a process and toolset to facilitate getting them translated and making those translations easily installable. This post is intended to lay out some issues and a potential approach in order to generate discussion.

Here are some assumptions and suggestions I have:

If you want to see how a group has grown over time or view your Civi groups in their hierarchy, check out the new Groups Extension.

De Goede Woning (our biggest and oldest CiviCRM client) have expressed lots of interest in CiviMobile. For them the main focus is on Activities and Cases. It is really important for the workers to be able to access and maintain data whilst on the road visiting and helping customers and stakeholders. So here is my first draft of what is required functionally, any thoughts and comments much appreciated!! We will probably start developing this stuff in October.

Today was the first day of the Apeldoorn part of the post-CiviCon sprints. A bit of a chaotic day with people coming in, shopping and lots of logistics. A nice cold too on top of that, although a real community one! Alice and Xavier are suffering from the same cold.....Xavier at home in bed, and Alice and I shared a sniffing office today :-) I did get a first draft on my requirements for CiviMobile Activities and Cases, blog post to follow.

We're just wrapping up the first of two post-CiviCon code sprints, where 24 people came together at Butcombe Farms near Bristol. People worked on an amazing variety of things to make 4.2 more stable, and to contribute some awesome features to 4.3. Some of the things we did were:

The following new functionality has been suggested. If you have any thoughts on this please take a look and add some comments to the Blog post.

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As part of the Bristol Civi Sprint a proposed new layout has been suggested for the existing Find and Merge Duplicates page. The page is used to add / edit Duplicate Matching Rules for the individual, organisation and household contact types. This wouldn't involve changes to the way the Merge Rules work but the changes will make the page easier to use and understand.

Better volunteer management tools have been on the want list of many a CiviCRM user, dating back as far as 2006. Many of the organizations we work with require tools for managing volunteers apropos to specific events. For example, they may host periodic festivals requiring heavy volunteer participation to cover needs from ticket-taking, to crowd control, to staffing info tables, to A/V.

If you are using Authorize.net as your payment processor (or your clients are) for either one-time payments or automated recurring payments, then my guess is that like me you probably dread the phone call from a bookkeeper such as

"I found some Authorize.net transactions that went through and the money is in the bank, BUT there is no record of the contribution in CiviCRM.  What happened?"