Blogs

As part of the Google Grants program for non-profits, Google offers their Google Checkout service to qualifying non-profits at no-charge with no processing fees. Depending on the fees you would pay with a competing processor this represents an instant 3% jump in your organization's fundraising efforts just by using Google Checkout.

The only limitation has been recurring donations. To address this Google launched Google Subscriptions and now we need to get support into CiviCRM so we can enjoy a single free processing fee payment gateway.

A new Make it Happen iniative was launched to get this going in 4.1 or even 3.4 if we meet the campaign goal soon! A donation to this iniative will easily pay itself back by the savings in processing fees. This initiative is already 70% there with donations from Powered by Action and the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA):

    http://civicrm.org/mih#google

Rumour has it that certain, ahem, consultants have been known to, on occasion, miss setting up the occasional CiviCRM cron, or not notice when the cron stops working on upgrade. Such consultants could wind up with egg on their face over crons. Somewhat less culpable are the CiviCRM newbies who didn't know their event waitlists wouldn't work or their memberships wouldn't roll over without the right cron.

Many modern web applications have a lot of spam deterrent such as Captcha, Bayesian filters, URL, ip detections etc. One example is trying to do 2 consecutive search on the CiviCRM.org forum and you will get a an error that look like

"Your last search was less than 5 seconds ago. Please try again later."

The concept behind this is flood control is to prevent a webbot (automated script) that is trying to spam and flood the server. 

Sorceforge recently conducted an unscientific twtpoll that yielded interested results. The top four factors in the success of an open source project were:

Hi all,

as announced earlier the Location API is no longer with us in the API v3 version. It was a beast of an API, too smart for its own good and certainly to smart for the API team!

Rooty Hollow is excited to announce the release of our Constant Contact Integration module for CiviCRM.  If you are not able or willing to deal with sending bulk e-mails form your host this module is for you.

We're a small children's theatre company and make great use of Google Analytics.  We use CiviCRM/CiviEvent for our patron database and online ticket sales, and wanted to add Google Analytics ecommerce tracking to track the effectiveness of our various marketing activities.

I did this by copying /civicrm/templates/CRM/Price/Page/LineItem.tpl into a custom template directory, and adding the tracking code to my custom version.  All of our "events" use price sets, and the price options are various ticket categories (child, adult, senior, etc).  The code below tracks not only the entire order amount, but also the quantities of individual items in the order.

We have set a date for the next CiviCRM BeNeLux meetup: Friday 15 April 2011 in the afternoon. More details will follow, but we do expect a demo of the CiviCRM Mobile app (Android and iPhone) from qbSet. 

We will also present the new feature on the upcoming 3.4 and 4.0 versions. If there is enough interest, we will focus on the new API v3.

Erik

We are excited to announce the publication of Using CiviCRM, by Packt Publishing – the first full-length, commercially published book covering implementation, configuration, and usage of CiviCRM.