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Back in May at CiviCRM North East, we looked at an example of using Form Builder to create a volunteer application form. This is a slightly delayed (sorry!) write up of that talk.

CiviCRM version 5.53.0 is now out and ready to download. This is a regular monthly release. Upgrade now for the most stable CiviCRM experience:

After a long hiatus, CiviCRM Developer Training is back! If you're looking to sharpen your skills or become actively engaged in CiviCRM development for the first time then you won't want to miss the developer training in Manchester, UK on 6 & 7 October. 

Come join CiviCRM core team members Coleman, Eileen, Josh, Mathieu and Tim for our "sprint" event for contributors based in the centre of Manchester, UK.

In case you have been living under a rock, the CiviCRM development environment has dramatically changed over the last 5 years. Recently I've had the opportunity to upgrade my 10 year old CiviCRM development chops by learning some of the new tools and I thought I would share my experiences.

In 2016 Tim Otten wrote a manifesto of sorts which outlined a practical and effective way to modernize CiviCRM. It boiled down to 5 letters: LExIM. 5 years on, CiviCRM is indeed in better shape than it was then, thanks to a tenacious community of developers following this path. So what is LExIM, why has it gotten us where we are today, and where are we headed?

Form Builder is a promising new cross-platform tool for making forms that sync with CiviCRM data. It's more powerful flexible than Profiles, and more compatible than proprietary plugins like Caldera. The only downside is that it's not finished. It is currently included with CiviCRM as a beta extension, but we can change that.

CiviCRM version 5.52.0 is now out and ready to download. This is a regular monthly release. Upgrade now for the most stable CiviCRM experience:

There are a few reporting extensions available for CiviCRM that add reporting template options, particularly for contribution reporting. In particular, ReportPlus stands out from the rest of the crowd as an interesting option to explore.

CiviSMTP is an email delivery service for CiviCRM that has been around since the very early days of CiviCRM. Even with CiviMail, making sure that emails land in the inbox, and not in the spam folder, can be a challenge. CiviSMTP made sure that their IPs had a good reputation, well configured, and good bounce management. At the time, they were the only service around that supported CiviCRM, and you could often meet their team at CiviCRM conferences in San Francisco, back in the day.

CiviCRM version 5.51.0 is now out and ready to download. This is a regular monthly release. Upgrade now for the most stable CiviCRM experience:

This July 27th and 28th we are planning a friendly and informal CiviCRM Sprint at Kaleider Studios in Exeter UK.

Sprints are in person events where the main focus is working together to contribute back to CiviCRM. They are often large events, many months in the planning but this one will be a lot smaller and more informal.

If you’re starting to see unexpected content at the top and/or bottom of your mailings, this may be to do with a recent upgrade (to 5.49.0+). For example, you might see text like “default HTML header”, or a footer offering opt-out where there previously was none. You might also see old headers/footers that you used to use.

So you have loads of useful data in your CiviCRM database… but the core CiviCRM reports just aren't cutting it. What to do? A number of our clients have worked around this by utilizing Jasper Reports, an open source tool that allows for building complex and flexible reports using data, read directly from CiviCRM.

Update 30 June 2022: The council elections process has been put on hold until further notice because we were unable to attract enough nominations to run an election.

It is official we now have a community maintained fork of the wordpress Caldera Forms plugin. You can find the fork here: https://lab.civicrm.org/extensions/caldera-civicrm

A huge thank you to Kevin Christiano for his hard work on forking this extension whilst keeping in good contact with the original developers of this extension. Thanks Kevin!

There has been a security release for CiviCRM. Upgrades are available for:

On the third and last day of the Berlin sprint we had a little bit for everyone!

For all Implementers / DevOps / CiviCRM-Nerds, Björn and Thomas introduced and demonstrated an extension that facilitates both the initial import and continous updates of data from external sources e.g. csv-files.

Something that many of us love and appreciate about CiviCRM is that diversity and inclusion has a very high value for us as a community. That's why from time to time we deliberate how the language in and around CiviCRM can be made more inclusive and gender-sensitive. And sometimes there are very practical results, too – such as the gender self-identify extension, for example.