CiviCRM.org Blog Feed

Explore

Find out more about how CiviCRM is being used in Canada and elsewhere.

Come to the Asia/Pacific CiviCRM meet-up on 21st May 2020

4 years 3 months ago

This is an open invitation for everyone in the Asia/Pacific region to join other Australians, New Zealanders etc. on-line to catch-up and discuss all things CiviCRM. If you are a CiviCRM user, developer or casual user with questions, then you are most welcome to join us.The meeting is only 1 hour and has a set agenda (depending on number of people attending this may be shortened).

justinfreeman

CiviCRM 5.25 Release

4 years 3 months ago

CiviCRM version 5.25.0 is now out and ready to download. This is a regular monthly release.

Upgrade now for the most stable CiviCRM experience: https://civicrm.org/download

Users of the CiviCRM Extended Security Releases (ESR) do not need to upgrade, as there are no ESR-specific bugfixes or security issues at the moment.

Important announcements:

dev-team

Drupal 6 support has been officially removed

4 years 3 months ago

As of CiviCRM 5.25, the minimum required PHP version is version 7.1, with PHP 7.3 being the recommended version. Since Drupal 6 does not support PHP 7.1 (except LTS vendors, such as myDropWizard), and since there are very few active CiviCRM sites on Drupal 6, we have decided to officially stop supporting Drupal 6.

bgm

Organization News Made Public with CiviMobile 5.1 Feed Reader

4 years 3 months ago

The latest version of CiviMobile 5.0 has pointed out a totally new direction for app development by introducing CiviMobile Public Area. For nonprofits it opened one more interaction channel with new opportunities to raise the organization profile among unregistered users, engage members, fundraisers, volunteers, supporters, enthusiasts etc.

skornien

Quarterly Report - Q1 2020

4 years 3 months ago

In late January, the CiviCRM Core Team published its 2019 annual report which laid out its objectives for 2020. While we’ve managed the occasional update somewhat randomly in the past, we’d like to stick to a cadence of quarterly updates going forward in order to communicate progress on our priorities. This update provides an overview of the first quarter of 2020 as well as reflects on what we see happening for the remainder of the year.

josh

Online Training on Contact Management for new CiviCRM users on April 23

4 years 4 months ago
Online Training on Contact Management for new CiviCRM users on April 23 cividesk Thu, 04/16/2020 - 19:26

Several spots are still available for Fundamentals of Contact Management - a beginner-level online training course brought to you by Cividesk on April 23, 2020 at 10 am - 12 pm PT | 11 am - 1 pm MT | 1 - 3 pm ET | 5 - 7 pm GMT.  Register now to secure your spot!

This class is highly recommended by the CiviCRM community as a good introduction for new users.

Please email Cividesk Customer Support & Training Manager, Tamar Meir, with any questions about this online training session or any of our other online classes.

Filed under Training
cividesk

Online Training on Contact Management for new CiviCRM users on April 23

4 years 4 months ago
Online Training on Contact Management for new CiviCRM users on April 23 cividesk Thu, 04/16/2020 - 19:26

Several spots are still available for Fundamentals of Contact Management - a beginner-level online training course brought to you by Cividesk on April 23, 2020 at 10 am - 12 pm PT | 11 am - 1 pm MT | 1 - 3 pm ET | 5 - 7 pm GMT.  Register now to secure your spot!

This class is highly recommended by the CiviCRM community as a good introduction for new users.

Please email Cividesk Customer Support & Training Manager, Tamar Meir, with any questions about this online training session or any of our other online classes.

Filed under Training
cividesk

CiviCRM 5.24.3 Security Release (and ESR 5.21.3)

4 years 4 months ago
CiviCRM 5.24.3 Security Release (and ESR 5.21.3) dev-team Wed, 04/15/2020 - 15:00

Important Notice: This is a security release. We recommend you immediately upgrade to one of the following versions:

Below are the security advisories details:

Support CiviCRM

We are committed to keeping CiviCRM free and open, forever. We depend on your support to help make that happen.

Filed under v5.x Security Releases Extended Security Release
dev-team

CiviCRM 5.24.3 Security Release (and ESR 5.21.3)

4 years 4 months ago
CiviCRM 5.24.3 Security Release (and ESR 5.21.3) dev-team Wed, 04/15/2020 - 15:00

Important Notice: This is a security release. We recommend you immediately upgrade to one of the following versions:

Below are the security advisories details:

Support CiviCRM

We are committed to keeping CiviCRM free and open, forever. We depend on your support to help make that happen.

Filed under v5.x Security Releases Extended Security Release
dev-team

CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French

4 years 4 months ago
CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French usha.makoa Wed, 04/15/2020 - 07:21 CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French

CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French (the Core interface and 66% of extensions).

Thank you to all past contributors (here and there, and before a lot of people) .

And now ? A new Challenge! CiviCRM still needs you to speak French! #superCiviCRMAvril2020challenge.

https://lab.civicrm.org/dev/translation/-/wikis/wikis/translation-guides/french/SuperCiviCRMAvril2020challenge with @allinappli

CiviCRM est traduit à 100% en Français

Youpi Civicrm 100% traduit en français ! (et 66% pour les extensions).

Merci à tous les contributeurs passés (ici et , et avant d'autres encore !) qui ont consacré du temps (beaucoup de temps) à traduire progressivement depuis le début !

et maintenant ? le #SuperCiviCRMAvril2020challenge
CiviCRM a besoin de vous pour parler Français complètement.

La traduction globale pourrait encore être améliorée et des ressources importantes restent à traduire (documentation, extensions...)

Quoi de mieux qu'un bon confinement pour contribuer collectivement avec le #superCiviCRMAvril2020challenge !

https://lab.civicrm.org/dev/translation/-/wikis/wikis/translation-guides/french/SuperCiviCRMAvril2020challenge avec @allinappli

Filed under Internationalization and Localization Comments Permalink michaelmcandrew Mon, 04/20/2020 - 05:46

Great work - thanks for sharing, Usha :)

usha.makoa

CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French

4 years 4 months ago
CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French usha.makoa Wed, 04/15/2020 - 07:21 CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French

CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French (the Core interface and 66% of extensions).

Thank you to all past contributors (here and there, and before a lot of people) .

And now ? A new Challenge! CiviCRM still needs you to speak French! #superCiviCRMAvril2020challenge.

https://lab.civicrm.org/dev/translation/-/wikis/wikis/translation-guides/french/SuperCiviCRMAvril2020challenge with @allinappli

CiviCRM est traduit à 100% en Français

Youpi Civicrm 100% traduit en français ! (et 66% pour les extensions).

Merci à tous les contributeurs passés (ici et , et avant d'autres encore !) qui ont consacré du temps (beaucoup de temps) à traduire progressivement depuis le début !

et maintenant ? le #SuperCiviCRMAvril2020challenge
CiviCRM a besoin de vous pour parler Français complètement.

La traduction globale pourrait encore être améliorée et des ressources importantes restent à traduire (documentation, extensions...)

Quoi de mieux qu'un bon confinement pour contribuer collectivement avec le #superCiviCRMAvril2020challenge !

https://lab.civicrm.org/dev/translation/-/wikis/wikis/translation-guides/french/SuperCiviCRMAvril2020challenge avec @allinappli

Filed under Internationalization and Localization
usha.makoa

CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French

4 years 4 months ago
CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French

CiviCRM is now 100% translated to French (the Core interface and 66% of extensions).

Thank you to all past contributors (here and there, and before a lot of people) .

And now ? A new Challenge! CiviCRM still needs you to speak French! #superCiviCRMAvril2020challenge.

usha.makoa

Progress on the civicrm.org Drupal8 upgrade

4 years 4 months ago
Progress on the civicrm.org Drupal8 upgrade bgm Sun, 04/05/2020 - 16:25

Back in September 2019, we had announced a plan to upgrade the content management system (CMS) running the civicrm.org website, as well as plans to make civicrm.org available in many languages. Today I'm happy to announce that we have reached a major milestone: most of the static content, user logins, blogs and many CiviCRM forms are now being served from Drupal8.

Before you login to see the shiny new toys available: please read this announcement first! We have done good progress, we are on track, but we are not done yet. A lot of the work is about getting moving to a more "modern" CMS, doing a lot of cleanup and otherwise providing feature-parity (or at least, we hope that the upgrade is not too disruptive). At this point, we are not asking people to actively test, but please report issues (in the marketing/civicrm-website issue queue) if you think that something important is broken.

What's new?

Contact Dashboard: If you click on the "Login" button in the top-right corner of the screen, we now default to displaying the CiviCRM Contact Dashboard. Tasks such as "Add blog post" or "Add new job posting" are now under the "Participate" menu (which may not be very obvious for now, but we will improve it eventually). Using the CiviCRM contact dashboard (instead of the Drupal user profiles) is part of the decision to leverage and promote CivICRM features where possible.

Blogs with Gutenberg: The blog now uses the Gutenberg content editor. People may have strong opinions about it, but we found that Gutenberg provides a great experience for content editing on Drupal. It addresses many of the criticisms about Drupal's user interface. We really wanted to simplify the interface, avoid having dozens of fields in a node just to comply with specific visuals. We wanted to avoid complex block configurations and panels. Finally, we also wanted to remove some hardcoded pages, such as the download page (which used to require changing PHP/template files in order to update the content, and now the page is a simple Gutenberg page that includes a Drupal block for the download links).

Languages

CiviCRM's user interface has been available in over 25 languages for a long time. I would argue that CiviCRM's powerful language features offers key advantages over other CRMs. Very few CRMs understand translation correctly, or can handle the complexities of countries or regions with many official languages, not to mention international organizations.

That said, while many techies understand English, having content in their own language is often a key factor for decisions makers and end-users. Many CiviCRM partners have highlighted that the decision to adopt or change a CRM is no longer a decision taken only by techies, but now increasingly a decision under scrutiny from their board of directors. In many regions, having a website and documentation available in their language can be a legal requirement for many organizations.

We have built on top of various previous community initiatives carried out in the past. We believe that by adding language support on the civicrm.org website, we will provide a more consistent and robust experience for all languages, and will make it easier to add support for new languages. More importantly, we hope it will reduce the barrier to entry for anyone who is not fluent in English.

For a glimpse of what it looks like, you can read about CiviCRM in Catalan or in French, or see a work-in-progress home page in French (note: this is not a design proposal for all languages, for now each language can create their own home page). Ah, and note how the home page in French is just a single Gutenberg node, with views/blocks inside it.

It will also be possible to have blogs in different languages. They will display language-specific content, if any, then any translations, if available, and finally they will fallback to English. So for example, the French-language blog may have blog posts specific to the French-speaking community, mixed with CiviCRM release announcements that have been translated, and will also display English blog posts that have not been translated. For now we encourage translators to focusing on translating static content (front page, "about CiviCRM", etc), rather than translating content that is only relevant for a short period of time.

CiviCRM forms (such as donation forms or event forms) will also eventually be available in other languages. We aim to build on top of Aidan's improvement to CiviCRM core which makes it possible to use different languages without enabling multilingual (read more), and we hope to improve core to implement something based on Bjoern's l10nx (i.e. a new mode for translations of content, such as contribution page titles or descriptions).

If you wish to get involved in translating the CiviCRM.org website, there is more information in the website translation wiki page.

A few technical notes

As mentioned earlier, most of the pages are being served from Drupal8, but not all. Notably, the English front page is still being served from Drupal7, as are a few of the "views" (listings), such as the Find and Expert page, and the extension releases.

We have been running two sites since November 2019. The two sites have the same theme (both Bootstrap-based, so it was easy to port the theme from Drupal7 to Drupal8). You can see whether the page is being served from Drupal7 or Drupal8 by looking at the page footer:

Technically, this was made possible using a proxy (nginx) that was sending specific pages to Drupal8, as we completed various sections. Since we knew that this was going to a be a long journey, we wanted to be sure that we could deploy features as soon as they were ready, to avoid feature-freezing the website for over six months. That being said, while it took a long time, we did not spend a lot of hours on the upgrade itself. We took a more minimalist approach in order to stay within budget (under $2000 so far, funded by the Core Team's regular budget, plus some pro-bono work).

Next steps

We still have to finish migrating important sections, such as the "experts" views/listings, case studies, events, extension management, as well as some more complex static-content pages. You can read more about it in the website tech revamp wiki page.

Once that is done, we can shift our focus back to content, design and adding features to the website (ex: improving the access-control features on CiviCRM itself, so that regional communities can more easily collaborate on civicrm.org).

Acknowledgements

Many people are contributing to the upgrade. Josh is doing most of the real work, making sure the end result and content make sense. Nic W has also been a long-time website contributor and supporter (and instigator of the 2019 translation survey). Francesc and Usha have helped beta-test translation. Luciano and Alejandro have been long-time instigators to have civicrm.org available in other languages.

Of course, using CiviCRM and Drupal8 has been possible only because many volunteers, partners and the Core Team are investing a lot of time to make it happen (and there's still work to do!). Hat-tip to the CiviCRM Entity folks (Mark, Karin, David S, Luke, Matt G, and others) for the Drupal8 Views integration, as well as to helpful support from the folks in the Drupal mattermost channel. Finally, thanks to someone (I think?) who went to a CiviCamp Amsterdam to demo Gutenberg on Drupal, and somehow that demo made its way to convince us to stay on Drupal and to adopt Gutenberg (if someone knows the story, please leave a comment!).

Filed under Tools Community Internationalization and Localization Marketing and Promotion
bgm

Progress on the civicrm.org Drupal8 upgrade

4 years 4 months ago
Progress on the civicrm.org Drupal8 upgrade bgm Sun, 04/05/2020 - 16:25

Back in September 2019, we had announced a plan to upgrade the content management system (CMS) running the civicrm.org website, as well as plans to make civicrm.org available in many languages. Today I'm happy to announce that we have reached a major milestone: most of the static content, user logins, blogs and many CiviCRM forms are now being served from Drupal8.

Before you login to see the shiny new toys available: please read this announcement first! We have done good progress, we are on track, but we are not done yet. A lot of the work is about getting moving to a more "modern" CMS, doing a lot of cleanup and otherwise providing feature-parity (or at least, we hope that the upgrade is not too disruptive). At this point, we are not asking people to actively test, but please report issues (in the marketing/civicrm-website issue queue) if you think that something important is broken.

What's new?

Contact Dashboard: If you click on the "Login" button in the top-right corner of the screen, we now default to displaying the CiviCRM Contact Dashboard. Tasks such as "Add blog post" or "Add new job posting" are now under the "Participate" menu (which may not be very obvious for now, but we will improve it eventually). Using the CiviCRM contact dashboard (instead of the Drupal user profiles) is part of the decision to leverage and promote CivICRM features where possible.

Blogs with Gutenberg: The blog now uses the Gutenberg content editor. People may have strong opinions about it, but we found that Gutenberg provides a great experience for content editing on Drupal. It addresses many of the criticisms about Drupal's user interface. We really wanted to simplify the interface, avoid having dozens of fields in a node just to comply with specific visuals. We wanted to avoid complex block configurations and panels. Finally, we also wanted to remove some hardcoded pages, such as the download page (which used to require changing PHP/template files in order to update the content, and now the page is a simple Gutenberg page that includes a Drupal block for the download links).

Languages

CiviCRM's user interface has been available in over 25 languages for a long time. I would argue that CiviCRM's powerful language features offers key advantages over other CRMs. Very few CRMs understand translation correctly, or can handle the complexities of countries or regions with many official languages, not to mention international organizations.

That said, while many techies understand English, having content in their own language is often a key factor for decisions makers and end-users. Many CiviCRM partners have highlighted that the decision to adopt or change a CRM is no longer a decision taken only by techies, but now increasingly a decision under scrutiny from their board of directors. In many regions, having a website and documentation available in their language can be a legal requirement for many organizations.

We have built on top of various previous community initiatives carried out in the past. We believe that by adding language support on the civicrm.org website, we will provide a more consistent and robust experience for all languages, and will make it easier to add support for new languages. More importantly, we hope it will reduce the barrier to entry for anyone who is not fluent in English.

For a glimpse of what it looks like, you can read about CiviCRM in Catalan or in French, or see a work-in-progress home page in French (note: this is not a design proposal for all languages, for now each language can create their own home page). Ah, and note how the home page in French is just a single Gutenberg node, with views/blocks inside it.

It will also be possible to have blogs in different languages. They will display language-specific content, if any, then any translations, if available, and finally they will fallback to English. So for example, the French-language blog may have blog posts specific to the French-speaking community, mixed with CiviCRM release announcements that have been translated, and will also display English blog posts that have not been translated. For now we encourage translators to focusing on translating static content (front page, "about CiviCRM", etc), rather than translating content that is only relevant for a short period of time.

CiviCRM forms (such as donation forms or event forms) will also eventually be available in other languages. We aim to build on top of Aidan's improvement to CiviCRM core which makes it possible to use different languages without enabling multilingual (read more), and we hope to improve core to implement something based on Bjoern's l10nx (i.e. a new mode for translations of content, such as contribution page titles or descriptions).

If you wish to get involved in translating the CiviCRM.org website, there is more information in the website translation wiki page.

A few technical notes

As mentioned earlier, most of the pages are being served from Drupal8, but not all. Notably, the English front page is still being served from Drupal7, as are a few of the "views" (listings), such as the Find and Expert page, and the extension releases.

We have been running two sites since November 2019. The two sites have the same theme (both Bootstrap-based, so it was easy to port the theme from Drupal7 to Drupal8). You can see whether the page is being served from Drupal7 or Drupal8 by looking at the page footer:

Technically, this was made possible using a proxy (nginx) that was sending specific pages to Drupal8, as we completed various sections. Since we knew that this was going to a be a long journey, we wanted to be sure that we could deploy features as soon as they were ready, to avoid feature-freezing the website for over six months. That being said, while it took a long time, we did not spend a lot of hours on the upgrade itself. We took a more minimalist approach in order to stay within budget (under $2000 so far, funded by the Core Team's regular budget, plus some pro-bono work).

Next steps

We still have to finish migrating important sections, such as the "experts" views/listings, case studies, events, extension management, as well as some more complex static-content pages. You can read more about it in the website tech revamp wiki page.

Once that is done, we can shift our focus back to content, design and adding features to the website (ex: improving the access-control features on CiviCRM itself, so that regional communities can more easily collaborate on civicrm.org).

Acknowledgements

Many people are contributing to the upgrade. Josh is doing most of the real work, making sure the end result and content make sense. Nic W has also been a long-time website contributor and supporter (and instigator of the 2019 translation survey). Francesc and Usha have helped beta-test translation. Luciano and Alejandro have been long-time instigators to have civicrm.org available in other languages.

Of course, using CiviCRM and Drupal8 has been possible only because many volunteers, partners and the Core Team are investing a lot of time to make it happen (and there's still work to do!). Hat-tip to the CiviCRM Entity folks (Mark, Karin, David S, Luke, Matt G, and others) for the Drupal8 Views integration, as well as to helpful support from the folks in the Drupal mattermost channel. Finally, thanks to someone (I think?) who went to a CiviCamp Amsterdam to demo Gutenberg on Drupal, and somehow that demo made its way to convince us to stay on Drupal and to adopt Gutenberg (if someone knows the story, please leave a comment!).

Filed under Tools Community Internationalization and Localization Marketing and Promotion
bgm

Progress on the civicrm.org Drupal8 upgrade

4 years 4 months ago

Back in September 2019, we had announced a plan to upgrade the content management system (CMS) running the civicrm.org website, as well as plans to make civicrm.org available in many languages. Today I'm happy to announce that we have reached a major milestone: most of the static content, user logins, blogs and many CiviCRM forms are now being served from Drupal8.

bgm
Checked
5 hours 36 minutes ago
Subscribe to CiviCRM.org Blog Feed feed