With CiviCRM 2.2.3 and a patch to the Drupal Date API CiviCRM will be adding integration with one more Drupal Module, Calendar. This means you will be able to display CiviCRM events in Drupal calendars and decide what events are displayed by using Views filters in the same manner as you would any View.
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I've combined my notes from the CiviCRM affinity group meeting and the user meeting and added notes from one conference session. In general, there were more people at the affinity group meeting this year than last year, more sessions that included CiviCRM, and I sensed more enthusiasm for CiviCRM. (One person told me she had been to the affinity group meeting and will be using CiviCRM.)
CiviCRM Affinity Group Meeting, April 26, 2009, at the NTEN conference, San Francisco, about 56 people
At the Developer camps on the 28th and 29th of April, 2009 (ie last week) one of the major tracks for all the breakout sessions was usability. Which is a major theme of the 2.3 version upgrade. In two of the groups I participated in we talked about the usability of the CiviEvent module from a an administrators perspective. One frustration that we decided need addressed was the 5 step wizard to create an event.
Google has once again continued their commitment to open source technology through the annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. The program runs from April through September and awards students a stipend for working on and completing qualified open source projects.
One of our requirements for CiviCase was a higher degree of security than what is normally associated with a community website. Users reach our CiviCase implementation via https, which is great, but leaves open the whole password issue. Those of you who live in the corporate IT world will be familiar with the two-factor ID solutions that are available on the market, from RSA, CryptoCard, and maybe others.
In brief: CiviCRM is having a good time here in Italy, associations and NGOs are very interested into the platform and how they may use it in order to reduce expenses and improve their "performance" in fund-raising tasks and management of databases.
I think that here in the UK, we're missing out on something. Ideally I would like to have a central place to communicate and support each other with civicrm. Hopefully this will help organise meet ups and other events in the same timezone.
I have set up a provisional group at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/civicrmuk/ if you could join up and start the ball rolling.