civicrm

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 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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There seems to be growing interest in CiviCRM in Seattle. People want to know more about what it is, how it works and how they can harness the power for their clients or their own organizations.

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It's a week and a day since the first ever CiviCon concluded. I've had a chance to encode and post all the videos from the Ingite and Lighting Talks (see below), and wanted to share just a few thoughts.  There were over 70 people at CiviCon, nearly double the number at the first DrupalCon (5 years ago). Both firsts took place 5 years after the project launched.  There were some jokes as we left the Michell Kapor Center about how big CiviCon will be in 5 years.

The opportunity to meet with so many great people working with CiviCRM was fantastic, and for me, it was the first time I had met folks from the Core team other than Dave Greenberg and Donald Lobo. I look forward to future CiviCon and meeting more people working with the software.  To that end I am going to convene a Seattle Area CiviCRM User Group (SEACUG), the first meeting of which will be announced shortly (it will be at the end of May).

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I recently upgraded CiviCRM for one of our clienst from 2.1.4 to 3.0.4 and learned a few tips that I'll share.  In most cases you just need to be sure to follow the instructions that CiviCRM provides and make all the intermediate upgrades along the way.  But In doing so, I ran into some frustrating problems, but through perseverence, ingenuity, and most important;y awesome support from Fen, Alex and Galaxy, I got around the problems and got the site upgraded.

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Recently, during a civicrm upgrade to 3.x, a client asked for each civiMail click-through to not only be tracked for mailing reports, but to show up as an activity record for the user that clicks through. The main problem with doing this out of the box is that when civimail sends an email, it doesn't send any record (other than the email address) of who is receiving that email.

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With the D7UC Initiative gaining steam and excepting brainstorming ideas, I figured it was a good time to map out my idea for Ubercart and CiviCRM integration. I realize that many may cringe at the mention of uniting these two applications, for all their complexities, yet I see it as critically important for many non profit organizations, and I'll explain why.

Many organizations that I have worked with want to take in money in two ways via the web:

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I attended a CiviCRM Developers Training on the 9th and 10th of September in New York City along with about 20 others including four members of the CiviCRM core team (Donald Lobo, Kurand Jalmi, David Greenberg and Yashodha Chaku).  The sessions were a mix of existing site presentations, new CiviCRM v3.0 feature demonstrations, and hands on configuration and coding.

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Recently, I was involved in a project here at CivicActions in which the client – a major university – wanted to to sell online courses geared towards high school teachers. These courses are intended to help school teachers incorporate more effective teaching techniques into their daily lesson plans. This client not only wanted the ability to sell these courses, but also wished to collect data from their customers that would allow the client to better target potential customers.

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The London CiviCRM event was short, 2 days, but packed with information. Bringing together both developers and advanced users it fused nicely the two sides of the fence.

We needed to install a version of 2.2 CiviCRM  on our sandboxes in order to attend; well it was a breeze to do, perhaps down to the installer which handled the install – no need to even touch config files. So that was a great start.

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