Team Blog

I'm really excited to announce that I will be running two CiviCRM user trainings in September and October.  Back in March and April I was involved in two similar trainings, one with Dave Greenberg from CiviCRM at the NTC, and the other during the workshop day before DrupalCon in San Francisco.  The feedback from both trainings was really positive. 

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We often hear the question, "What email service provider do you recommend?" from clients, prospective clients, or even just friends.  For those using CiviCRM we recommend using the built in CiviMail in conjunction with an SMTP service like CiviSMTP to handle deliverability issues.  But for those not using CiviCRM the answer is always a tricky one to arrive upon because there are so many different variables to consider: volume, pricing, east of use, reporting, and on and on.

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If the THREE THOUSAND Drupal geeks at DrupalCon San Francisco in April, including the friggin' WHITE HOUSE wasn't enough to convince you that Drupal has hit "The Enterprise," this bit of news oughta' put a nail in it:

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We have a client that wanted to be able to process donations when the Credit Card's CVV numbers were not available. I had thought this field was mandatory, and indeed, CiviCRM's AuthorizeNet payment processor package requires it. But after talking with AuthorizeNet (the company) we discovered that the field is optional.

This is a useful trick that fellow CivicActions team member and CiviCRM wizard Matt Chapman showed me. Basically, the hook_civicrm_validate() function can be used to reset an error caused by a missing field. Here's the entirety of the civicrm_cvv module:

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Come to Drupalcon Copenhagen

Nobody likes to be in an unproductive meeting. Yet many phone conferences and business meetings drag on way too long, go off-topic or simply have unfocused leadership.

Here are three simple ways you can apply right away to make all your meetings more effective:

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I love learning and sharing tips that make my day more productive. Often times, it's the simplest ones I find the most useful.

If you're like me, you spend a significant portion of your day interacting on the Gmail web interface. However, one of my biggest pet peeves in Gmail is that when composing a new message I lose access to the rest of my mailbox, since it takes up the entire window.

Alas, I discovered the key! By simply by holding down the SHIFT key when clicking COMPOSE MAIL, a pop-up window appears, and access to the full mailbox is retained.

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A question recently came up on our internal team list. One of our team members was looking for recommendations on where to move her money.  She was currently banking with Chase and was disturbed by learning of the connection between Chase and BP.  This being just one reason of many to move your money from a big bank like Chase, she decided it was time.  Many of us at CivicActions bank with local banks or credit unions and the responses to her query brought many stories of others who had either recently or long been banking with credit unions.

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With all the new people joining the CivicActions team in the past few weeks, it's easy for us all to forget an important part of the on-boarding process of new civic-minded nodeists.

Profile pictures.

An appropriate profile picture is essential to one's ensconcement into the CivicActions fold. Before you go digging through iPhoto for that winning head-shot, let me present a brief analysis of what makes a properly awesome CivicActions profile photo.

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No, Code for America isn't looking for a couple thousand gentlemen.  They're looking for geeks (of any gender) to award yearlong Fellowships (living wage, health insurance, travel expenses) starting in 2011 to build Government 2.0 apps for a number of local governments. 

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