Late last month, I attended a two-day code sprint in New York for CiviCRM, the free software constituent relationship management system. I want to say a few words about it because I thought it was a great experience, and a good model for other free software projects to follow (many already do!).
Having just had to import data that included a membership number for a client, rather than make a new field for the number it made sense to use the Contact ID, given that this is already a consecutive number and unique to each contact. The problem was that over the years there were big gaps in the consecutive numbers.
There are a range of materials that can be distributed to organisations interested in CiviCRM. These are currently available on http://civicrm.org/content/spreadtheword
Following a couple of discussions of this, the consensus seems to be that having good coordinated training materials is important to a maturing product to give confidence to organisations buying into the ecosystem. The doumentation has moved along considerably in the new book and this structure seems a reasonable place to start for creating a set of training videos.
Anyone currently working on video?
In doing some research for a potential project, I was exploring what kinds of eAdvocacy options were available to plug in to CiviCRM. Many of the big commercial eAdvocacy tools have big commercial price tags to go with them (and don't integrate directly with CiviCRM besides).
As many of you know with 3.4 & 4.0 a new API came out (APIv3). The new API had a number of improvements over the previous v2 including
Recently on CiviCRM irc and forum few people asked about adding client side validation for phone field. By default CiviCRM packages validate plugin, so this can be easily implemented with minor customization. Below is the example of validating US phone number on new contact form.
Good documentation is mission critical for the success of any software project. As a project we essentially have three audiences for our documentation:
Users Site Builders DevelopersWe have a couple of customers who have been asking to be able to set-up recurring contributions against pledges. This seems to be a possibly contentious improvement so I'm looking for feedback on it.
