Blog posts by Eileen

Rules integration, Multiple contact subtypes, Upsell / change membership type, Permissioning integration with Joomla 1.6 ACL, Personal Campaign Pages - offline contributions, Integrate CiviCampaign with CiviEngage, contributions, events and mailings, and a few holdovers from 3.3.

In some ways choosing Open Source software is like making a bet on humanity. We choose to believe that without contract or obligation individuals, organisations and businesses will work together to produce something that benefits all of us. With CiviCRM it feels like we've upped the odds to double or nothing because the organisations that use CiviCRM represent some of our noblest causes (and some that we may not agree with) but parting with funds from cash-strapped or deserving organisations to fund shared development is a lot harder than spending money out of a business account.

In my mind contributing back to Open Source projects that we benefit from and CiviCRM in particular is both a moral and a practical obligation. If we want it to be there for us we have to be there for it. For those of us who may have limited funds Make-it-Happen is a great way to make our bet on a scale that is appropriate to us or our organisation.

Going into 2011 community funding via Make-it-Happen and direct sponsorship is going to be the key driver behind the remaining 3.x releases. Release 3.4 and 4.0 are both expected early in the new year with 3.4 being the last release that will support drupal 6 and 4.0 supporting drupal 7. Obviously supporting two versions of drupal will put pressure on the CiviCRM core team and the duration of that double support will depend on the community.

However, right now it's the time for us to think about what initiatives we want to support into release 3.4. There are some ongoing and some new intiatives up for sponsorship.

As 3.3. goes live it’s great to see a couple of Make-it-Happen initiatives included in it. The Make-it-Happen initiative was born out of my frustration at the difficulties of getting things into CiviCRM that were useful for everyone but not funded by any ONE organisation.

Just a quick update to say that the 'de-dupe exception table' initiative is now funded for release 3.3. This will allow those poor souls struggling through a big de-dupe to mark some contacts as 'non-matches' and not have to wade through them every time.

This initiative was sponsored by

Creative Commons

Community Builders Australia Pty Ltd

Australian Greens

NES Alumni and Friends Nonprofit Partnership

We are extending the 3.3 deadline to the 3rd of October to make one last push towards getting more of the initiatives into 3.3 and after that the focus will move to trying to get some more momentum for 3.4. Personally I would LOVE to see the dedupe exception table item get some funding. Anyone who has done deduping themselves will understand why!

I'm pleased to announce that the target for the first of the Civi-Make-it-Happen initiatives has been reached. We have raised $750 to fund enhancing the dedupe functionality to merge CMS user accounts when de-duping. Those of us who are familiar with the experience of clicking on each contact to see which one has a userID before clicking merge will be pleased to see this enhancement and grateful to those who donated.

Sometimes I get frustrated with CiviCRM. For all the great features there are problems / limitations that we seem to keep hitting. So, if lots of people want the same things added / fixed why aren’t they being fixed?

We have been looking at whether it is a good idea to use households and thought I would pull together the various things that have been written about households into a bit of a 'where are they at'.

When working in setting up and developing websites (among other things) we often have to choose between getting stuck in and getting stuff done the known way or trying to invest time in coming up with a more automated way or efficient way of doing things. Usually at some point we become aware of whether we made the right choice – and I find that moment is normally accompanied by a certain sinking feeling.

A while ago I mentioned that I was finding the backup and migrate module a better option to syncing Civi installs that the Civi drush command and Lobo asked if I would do a write-up on it.

I'm going to keep this pretty brief but I think it is worth telling people about as I find it really quick & easy.

http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate (AKA BAM)