HOWTO

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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In my last post I wrote about the important step we took in forming our single, large team into small, focused project teams (called Pods), and how we did that. Once we got the important step of generating Focus out of the way with the Pods, the way was clear, even though we could hardly believe it, to start to apply the Agile/Scrum process.

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Last week I wrote about some research we conducted regarding Foundations and their use of Twitter. One thing I noticed in our research is that many Foundations are primarily using the Twitter website to interface with the service. In this post I will highlight a few tips for Foundations that want to make better use of Twitter, or improve their management of the social media tool.

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"A Quiet Revolution" is how I can best describe the process by which CivicActions has, over the last two years, adopted the Agile/Scrum process as our means of working with clients, internal teams and one another. And it continues as we learn more, add team members, work with new clients and shift into our own, more functional and agile organizational structure.

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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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CiviCRM offers a function to check for duplicate contacts either manually, or on user submission.  Duplicate matching is very useful for preventing duplicate records from being created when you allow anonymous users to register for events, or make donations.  Without it, ever time an anonymous user did one of those two things, you would get a new record for them in the database.

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Last year I wrote about how an organization could aggregate shared bookmarks from multiple people and present them on their website.  In the recent redeisgn of CivicActions.com we implemented this functionality.  You can see the shared bookmarks feed in the center column at the bottom of the home page, or you can look at a more complete list.

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If you are a developer, blogger or a client who manages or participated on a technical project, screenshot-taking tools are a very useful way conveying your thoughts and ideas to others on your team. Screenshots save you from lengthy explanation emails and keep your team on same page while discussing an idea. This blog post is about different screen capturing tools available out there and which to use and why.

1. Skitch(mac only):

Skitch is more than just an image capturing tool. It is very quick, simple and efficient. You can edit your images - crop them, draw figures on them, write notes on them and share directly via uploading to skitch, flickr, ftp with many other options. This all is mere drag and drop with nothing complex to learn. Download Skitch. Images in this blog are captured using skitch only.

Shortcut keys with skitch:

• Command-Shift-5 – Crosshairs Snap
• Command-Shift-6 – Fullscreen Snap
• Command-Shift-7 – Frame Snap

There is also a great short video on the Skitch website that gives you a quick overview of how it works and what it can do.

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We've created many sites with user profiles, and every site seems to have a few differences, but there are certain best practices which I would like to share.

Module Requirements

This article concerns user profiles in Drupal 6, and recommends that you have the following modules installed:

• CCK
• Content Profile
• Auto Node Title
• Filefield (optional)
• Imagefield (optional)
• Link (optional)

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In Developing A Personal Email Management Strategy I discussed the sorting, filtering and processing of the seemingly endless flow of email I receive. Recently, I took the plunge and converted my non work email to IMAP in preparation for converting work email to the same. The goal is to be able to see important direct email on my iPhone without seeing all the list traffic, commercial communications and other solicited bulk email.

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