Joomla! Day UK is scheduled for March 13 and 14, 2009 in Kent. The organizers would like to include one or more CiviCRM-related sessions, depending on interest and availability of presenters.

If you are interested in or planning on attending OR if you are interested in helping to organize / present at a CiviCRM or NGO / Non-profit session - please post back to the forum topic.

If there's a decent number of folks planning on attending - we can look at organizing an additional user group meetup in Kent either before or after the conference (and possibly get one of our core team members to Kent to join in the fun).

You can read about the Joomla! Day UK on their event site.

The team has released version 2.1.4 with approximately 25 minor bug fixes. You can see a listing of the issues included in this release on the issue tracker.

Download

You can download CiviCRM 2.1.4 from our download page. Select from the civicrm-stable section. The filenames include the 2.1.4 label: civicrm-2.1.4…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal / Joomla!). Select the Drupal download for Standalone upgrades.
 

Upgrading

You can upgrade directly to 2.1.4 from 2.1.0, 2.1.1 or 2.1.2. We've also made a few changes to simplify the upgrade process a bit. Upgrade instructions are available on the wiki for Drupal, Joomla and Standalone.

If you're still running CiviCRM 2.0 - "making the move to 2.1" has gotten a bit easier as well (we've eliminated a few steps in the upgrade). Of course you'll still need to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 or Joomla! 1.0 to Joomla! 1.5. This could be a good time to look at requirements and support for any other components / modules you're using. Complete upgrade instructions for 2.0 sites are on the wiki for Drupal and Joomla!.

Coding has been completed for the phase 1 features of CiviCase - our new case management component, and we're deep into a quality assurance cycle as I type this. (If you haven't been following the evolution of this project, you can check out earlier posts here.)

One of the cool things about CiviCase is that it allows organizations to configure workflows for the different types of cases they handle. We're implementing these work-flows for "physicians' health" cases in collaboration with our sponsor for the project - Physician Health Program of British Columbia.

I'd also like to include sample configurations for several other case management settings when we release CiviCase as part of v2.2. For example, workflows for organizations who provide housing assistance, or family services or .... In order to accomplish this (in more than a half-***** way) - I'd like to hook up with folks who have some experience in one or more of these areas. If you work with an organization that could use a tool like CiviCase to help with their work - and is up for acting as a beta site - that would be even better.

If you have questions about whether CiviCase is a "good fit" your organization - please post them to the CiviCase forum board with as much detail as possible about your requirements. If you can help out with constructing sample configurations, please ping me at dave at civicrm dot org.

Hello everyone,

Tags are a powerful way of organising contacts, and you can use them to add topics of interest, type of organisations, type of donors... as you might already have discovered, you can quickly get a lot of them, and it becomes quite difficult to use them properly as soon as you have more than an handful.

It's that time of year again!

No, not what you think. :-) It's the time of year when new a CiviCRM version is behind the door, and it has cool new features. Code freeze is going to be introduced any day now - and we'll move on to quality assurance, alphas, betas and other equally exciting stuff.

Let me briefly introduce you to two new 2.2 features: one of them already mentioned here and there - Personal Contribution Pages (PCP), and a "last minute" addition - Soft Credits.

The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) published the results of it's first-ever Donor Management Software (DMS) Satisfaction Survey last week. Nearly 1,000 people participated in the survey - whose goal was to help nonprofits "find the DMS that is best for your organization".

Regulars readers of this blog will recall that we were quite disappointed when the survey was announced - due to the fact that CiviCRM was NOT INCLUDED In the list of Donor Management Software solutions in the survey. The good news is that folks in our community stepped up nicely. Despite being a "write-in candidate" CiviCRM got the fourth highest number of respondents to the question "Please select the product that you consider your PRIMARY donor management system."

CiviMail is getting another major upgrade in 2.2. Some of the features coming in 2.2 include:

• PHP return channel solution. This feature should enable more folks to install and run CiviMail. This will obsolete our amavisd return channel solution. No perl or sys admin / root access expertise needed any more :)
• Adding CiviMail as an "action" to search results. This feature will allow folks to send a mailing to a "dynamic smart group" and alleviate the need to create multiple groups just for civimail purposes. Thus if you want to send a targeted mailing to all the folks in the 94135 zip code in your "we want more green trees" group, you enter the relevant search parameters (check the group and type the zip code), do the search and invoke the "Send Bulk Email" action. You can read more about this issue here
• Adding token hooks and ability to send "templatized" emails. This is described in more detail below

CiviCRM 2.1.2 release with bug fixes, as well as a fix for a critical security vulnerability is now available for download. CiviCRM 2.0.7 a maintainance release fixing critical security vulnerabilities is also available for download. The vulnerability addressed could allow a remote user with insufficient permissions to access CiviCRM functionality via the API and / or command line scripts.

Upgrading your existing CiviCRM 2.0 and 2.1 sites is strongly recommended. Upgrade instructions are available on the wiki for Drupal, Joomla and Standalone

Over the last week or two a growing number of folks have been discussing improvements to the REST API. Several months back I wrote a small patch that opened the experimental REST interface to the whole API of the system. When that happened a few other people started to show some interest in what could be done with this new functionality.

There are a couple changes being worked on, and several more proposed for future work.

Our global meeting resulted in some new features being added to 2.2. Our team worked on a new jQuery based country/state selector and incorporating hook(s) to the "amount" functionality of online contribution and event registration pages. I'll give a brief description of the feature set and functionality of these projects

New jQuery based State Country widget

Our previous widget was a dojo based combo box widget. Both the country and the state were ajax based combo boxes. The state combo box was dependent on the value chosen in the country combo box. This implementation was quite complex and not easily replicated (hence u did not see the widget in many places). For 2.2 we took a slightly different approach: The country field is a simple html select box (the values are restricted by the countries configured in the admin area). The state selector is now dynamic and refreshed with new values whenever the country is changed. We took inspiration and borrowed a fair part of the code from: Simple chained combobox plugin for jQuery.