CiviCRM.org Blog Feed

Long, long ago, before we had indoor plumbing, penicillin or `civix generate:module`, a humble drupal module was born.

It tried its best to be helpful by employing an (at the time) cutting edge technique known as CRM_Utils_Migrate_Import to dump a motley collection of custom fields, profiles and options into your CiviCRM database.

Along with other cutting edge techniques (such as lobotomies), the process of automatically adding custom fields, profiles and options has been improved and now can be done with managed entities and our lovely api.

Register to participate in the upcoming training session, "Customize your Database with Custom Fields and Profiles" offered by Cividesk on Thursday, April 25th at 10 am MT/ 11 am CT/ 12 pm ET.

Have you ever wondered, how can I give a group of contacts specific capabilities? We have too. And now you can! Introducing the CiviCRM Groups Sync Plugin (CGS). This plugin provides a new way for access control to be managed that associates a group of users in WordPress to a group of contacts in CiviCRM. Taking away the need to create a new WordPress user role anytime someone needs a slightly different kind of access to CiviCRM.

We are in the final countdown to the UK CiviCamp in Leeds, on the 3rd May 2019. Lots of the sessions are now finalised and there will be a good range of topics and opportunities to find out more:

I have just published a new extension Former Communication Data.

The extension simply saves emailaddresses, phone numbers and address details in a separate tab on the contact summary when they are deleted as you can see in the attached screen print.

How can we find a user-friendly way of creating templates for serial letters and other mass communication? Is it possible to integrate CiviCRM with open-source online applications to facilitate the creation of office templates for our users?

This has been bothering us for some time, because many of our users find it hard to set up and work with templates in HTML format. So we started a proof of concept to check possible options… and we found an answer!

Over the past 12 months the team at Compucorp have been working super hard on a major leap for the CiviCRM membership module. We have a new suite of extensions and modules that will shortly be available to download from the CiviCRM website (you can download the beta from github now!). These include:

Back by popular demand, Cividesk is offering a week of intensive training on the Fundamentals of CiviCRM the week of April 15th - 19th.

This promotion incorporates all of our basics classes: Contacts, Membership, Events, Contributions, Emailing (one class per day) and is an excellent opportunity to quickly train new staff or learn more about a particular module in CiviCRM. 

Don't forget your sunscreen! The Global Community Summit is coming to Barcelona on October: Register Now!

Do you want to use Civi in multiple languages? This new feature adds more options to enable users to access CiviCRM in their language of choice.

This feature allows admins to configure a list of languages for users to select from and set the language of the CiviCRM interface for their own use.  This translates the CiviCRM interface but does not translate content.  For example, the menus are translated but content and option values (eg Mr/Mrs) are not translated.

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally managed to post the Core Team’s financials online in a format that not only shows where we’re at but also breaks down our income and expenses over the past 12 months. We’ve maintained project stats online for some time at https://stats.civicrm.org so it made sense to just add a new tab there. Check it out here. The financials are currently updated each month, and we’ll continue to expand on them as we have capacity.

Cividesk offers a variety of live instruction online training courses for new and current users of CiviCRM. Join us on April 4th at 10 am MT/12 pm ET for our Organizing a Fundraising Campaign training session that is designed for current users of CiviCRM.

One of the questions we occasionally get from our clients concerns how users can search for non-primary emails, addresses, and phone numbers in CiviCRM.  Because so many constituents use different emails for different purposes - one for billing, one for bulk emails, and so forth - it can become a challenge to locate people in your data.  However, we have a couple of suggestions for how you can search across all emails, phone numbers, and addresses.

Option 1: Add Them to Your Search Results

CiviCRM core now offers a Continuous Integration service to partner & member organisations on their extensions. The service will run the unit tests associated with an extension whenever a PR is submitted to that extension. This is similar to the process that runs on core and is driven by jenkins and runs on the same test infrastructure. There are free services that do this (e.g Travis) on github in general but they don’t provide the CiviCRM setup and database environment that is needed to run tests on CiviCRM.

If you are new to CiviCRM or would like more formal training in the basics of contact management, the Fundamentals of Contact Management offered by Cividesk is the perfect online training session for you. 

Late last year CiviCRM won some seed funding from Mozilla’s MOSS fund to support the core team, and also research our community priorities. We're focussing on two questions connected to CiviCRM’s future growth and sustainability:

Register now for the online class, "Organizing Successful Events" offered by Cividesk that is designed for current users of CiviCRM. This 2- hour session is taught live on Tuesday, March 12th at 10 am MT / 11 am CT / 12 pm ET (recorded versions are not available).