civicrm

As mentioned in the previous post, the recently announced Blackbaud acquisition of Convio - two giants in the closed-source world that provide web services primarily for non-profits - caused a stir not only in the non-profit world but also in the Free and Open Source software world.  Allen Gunn of Aspir

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With this week's announcement that Blackbaud will buy Convio there have been many questions whether this will be good or bad for the nonprofit organizations both companies count as their clients. We have often had clients and other nonprofit organizations we come into contact with us ask about the open source tools we specialize in, and how they compare with the proprietary tools or Software as a Service offerings that they've heard about. One very clear difference is that the open source tools don't get bought up and consolidated.

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Earlier this year I was tasked with migrating a 60K contact Kintera database to CiviCRM. To make matters more "interesting", the client also had a home-grown database with mixed information, some defining new contacts and some adding information to the Kintera contacts. As it was a custom database, I won't discuss the second database merge issue any further (perhaps I just want to put it all behind me) except where needed to fill in other points.

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Ten developers came to the Big Apple earlier this week to sit with primary CiviCRM developers @lobo and @dgg during a two-day Usability, Test and Code Sprint. Once again, Rayogram hosted the event, providing a central location in Manhattan and an excellent working environment.

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CiviMember is a powerful component of CiviCRM that allows visitors to your site to signup to become members of your organization, with or without paying a fee.  If your organization also offers features for which it makes sense for your members to be users of your Drupal site, you can configure CiviMember Contribution Pages to also require (or make optional) Drupal User signup.

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Recently I worked with Grantmakers In The Arts, a national association of private and public funders making grants to artists and arts, to provide training on how they can get the most out of their CiviCRM database. In this post I am going to explain one specific bit of functionality that I helped them think through: managing grants that they receive (as opposed to give).

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I'm both fortunate and excited to be attending this year's DrupalCon in Chicago, as there is are a lot of new developments in the Drupal world that I want to become more familiar with, some of which I mention below.

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I have always found CiviCRMs ACLs (Access Control Lists) system to be a bit of a mystery and a setting them up right to be a black art.

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We are proud to once again be sponsors of CiviCON, the annual conference for CiviCRM implementers and developers.  Last year's conference was held in conjunction with DrupalCon in San Francisco, and this year's will precede  DrupalCon in Chicago (which we are also sponsoring).

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We are getting ready to launch a site for a client that makes heavy use of CiviCRM and CiviEvent.  During a pre-launch training on CiviCRM the client asked about best practices for using price sets. Each year the organization runs multiple events that have a variety of prices, but from year to year the prices change, and they wanted to know if they should change the prices in a price set or create a new price set.

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