Opinion

CiviCRM User Group

The UK CiviCRM user group meeting took place last night in London. We were there, and this is our report.

people at CiviCRM meetup at techhub
CiviCRM meetup

The meetup was hosted at techhub, in London’s “Silicon Roundabout”, Old Street. Our host for the evening was Michael McAndrew of Third Sector Design, a company specialising in CiviCRM based in techhub.

Meet-ups are free and a great way to get to learn more about CiviCRM and are suitable for those that are new to CiviCRM as well as people that have been using it for years. There were two presentations, a mingle session and a case study report from a charity that’s successfully implemented CiviCRM.

CiviCRM in 2012

The keywords for 2012 are: mobile, scalable, community.

CiviCRM logo
CiviCRM

A code sprint (?) scheduled for later this month in London will be focusing on CiviMobile. CiviCRM for mobile devices includes iPhone, Android, iPad, Blackberry and more. This version will include the ability to view/search contacts and see most of the details of each contact. It will also allow users to create/edit contacts, and handle event attendee check-in. Several core developers will be in town and any developers are welcome to join.

CiviCon is taking place in San Fransisco on 2nd April. CiviCon is THE annual event bringing together the people who use, develop, design and implement CiviCRM. Good news for us in the UK though, a CiviCon Europe is planned for Autumn, although dates and location have not yet been finalised.

CiviCRM 4.1 News

  • Beta release for WordPress – along with Drupal and Joomla, CiviCRM will now work within WordPress. WordPress has emerged from it’s blogging roots to become one of the most widely used content managment systems in use today, powering an amazing 14% of the web.
  • Social plugins (Facebook, Twitter etc).
  • Better cron (simple for admins to setup).
  • Personalisation of campaign pages for events (think JustGiving).
  • Improvement to admin menu.

A couple of UK specific projects were mentioned, with a call for some help from developers or sponsors to get them completed. These are Direct Debit integration and Gift Aid. The Direct Debit integration is a “make it happen” project, which basically is a call for funding, and the Gift Aid module needs a bit of development help to fix some not too tricky bugs.

CiviCRM Marketing

The new CiviCRM website
The new CiviCRM website

Dave Moreton, from Bristol based Circle Interactive, talked to the group about improving the marketing of CiviCRM. It’s apparent that next to the giant forces of SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics etc, CiviCRM has a much lower profile. It’s also true that it’s a very different product. That said, the non-profit, membership, civic sector are often unaware of the existence of CiviCRM and end up using a commercial-focused CRM system that is less than ideal. David’s talk was about efforts within the CiviCRM community to increase awareness, talk up it’s successes and provide comparisons and marketing material for system integrators to use. He finished by showing us a sneak peak at the new CiviCRM website, which of course aims to solve these issues.

If you are interested in helping, there are occasional IRC meets, an online group at civicrm.org/groups/marketing and PDFs, Powerpoint and how-to material at Spreadtheword

CiviCRM Case Study

Finally we heard from Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research (LLR). Parvez Saleh from Veda Consulting, talked us through the tasks that were needed for migrate in just 2 hours a complete legacy system to CiviCRM.

Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research website screenshot
the LLR website

LLR went from a system that was used by just a few users which specialist knowledge (and lots and lots of spreadsheets), to a website-integrated CiviCRM system that can be accessed by 80+ users, speeds up the financial reporting functions and will save the charity tens of thousands over the next few years, as well as enabling increased fundraising. Now one of the largest CiviCRM installations in the UK, the system serves the needs of 350,000 contacts, 90,000+ participants and over 1.2 million contributions a year. LLR are now holding a “spreadsheet amnesty” to move all data onto the system.

Successful Event

The event was attended by around 50 people. Most were new to CiviCRM but we also met with system integrators, developers, current users and administrators. The user group meeting showed that there is an established infrastructure of support for CiviCRM here the UK, and organisations considering it for themselves can be confident they will get the support they need. 2020Media provides complete hosting packages for CiviCRM, and our support is based around our hosting expertise. Therefore we can deal with the kind of problems you might have if you get a error on a page, emails not being sent, uploading images and so on. We can also help users get to grips with the basics of using Civi. We also have a network of developers and consultants so get in touch if you want to know more.

 

 

 

Opinion

Joomla 2.5 released

joomla 2.5 logo
joomla 2.5

The long awaited new version of Joomla has been released today.

Joomla is a free content management system used on tens of thousands of websites of all shapes and sizes.

  • 2020Media hosting fully supports Joomla 2.5
  • 2020Media can help you migrate older Joomla versions to 2.5

Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Previous versions of Joomla were compatible exclusively with MySQL databases. This improves support on the Windows platform, which 2020Media are able to offer at no extra cost.

Other key features in Joomla 2.5 includes:

  • Automatic notification when a Joomla or extension update is available. When logged into the control panel, site administrators will instantly have access to new notification buttons that allows them to see and act on the latest updates. In addition to updates for the Joomla CMS, a second button offers third party extension notification updates.
  • A better natural language search engine to the Joomla core. Complete with auto-completion and stemming (for example if you type “running” in a search field you also see run), it is faster and more versatile than the standard search.

Contact 2020Media on 0370 321 2020 or sales@2020media.com or www.2020media.com/contact for more information about UK Joomla hosting.

Joomla 2.5 check
2020Media hosting fully supports Joomla 2.5
Opinion

Joomla User Group Report 17 Jan 2012

1 Comment
picture of a Jug
Joomla User Group - Jug - geddit?

The first London Joomla user group meeting took place at UCL on 17 January. The user group is open to all with an interest in Joomla and no level of technical knowledge is required. This meeting welcomed many new faces and we hope they’ll join the user group again.

Joomla Template Overrides

There was no set agenda this month, but a topic that was explored in detail was template overrides. Joe from Softforge demonstrated the technique which allows you to modify the look and feel of your site in ways beyond what is built into the template options.  By using template overrides you avoid modifying core Joomla files and this means you can update Joomla when you need to, without worrying about breaking your website. The technique is simple in essence, though finding the right files or files to move does require some knowledge, and asking the usergroup is a great place to get some help.

  1. Copy Joomla core file to appropriate location within template folder
  2. Modify copied file as required.
  3. Reload Joomla page (clearing cache if needed).

It was suggested that template overrides be covered in more detail in another user group meeting.

News from the Joomla eco-sphere

  • Virtuemart out. The big daddy of Joomla shopping cart is finally released and feedback was good
  • K2 out. A component the replaces the ‘article’ with more extendible functions. think of Joomla! articles with additional fields for article images, videos, image galleries and attachments.
  • Rockettheme dropping Drupal. Popular Joomla template shop will stop developing themes for Drupal after low takeup.
  • Joomla 2.5, the next long term stable release is due for release on 24 Jan. Joomla 1.5 reaches end of life in April 2012.

Mootools/jquery

Mootools is a bundle of javascript included in Joomla core and is often used for making sliders and pop up photo galleries. Many third-party extensions use the jquery javascript library for their functions and there is currently a debate around including jquery within Joomla core. At the moment you often get several copies of jquery loaded by different extensions (and often different versions of jquery at that!). The argument against adding jquery to Joomla core is that recently a lot of work has been focussed on making the core as lightweight as possible.

The next meeting is on February 21st. If you plan on attending, let us know at 2020Media and we’ll see you there.

www.2020media.com/joomla

Domain Names

ICANN opens new top level domain process

New gTLD Program Timeline
New gTLD Program Timeline

ICANN, the organisation in charge of the global domain name system, tonight opens the 3 month process for allowing applications for new top level domains. Top level domains are the ‘right of the dot’ extension on domain names – like .com, .uk, .xxx.

From midnight 12 Jan 2012 until April 12th 2012, anyone who can stump up $185,000 (£119,500) as a processing fee can apply for more or less any domain name extention they like*.

*ICANN has a multi-stakeholder consensus-based decision making process so there are plently of caveats, special cases and  discounts for worthy causes.

You can find out more about the process at the newgTLD Icann website.

2020Media offers registration services for domain names worldwide and we welcome the changes ICANN has made. Although it’s likely many of the applications will be by big brands like Facebook and Microsoft for domains that won’t be available for the public, there will still be more choice in the coming months and years.

Opinion

CiviCRM 2012

civicrm logoCiviCRM, the free and Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector went from strength to strength in 2011. 2020Media has been providing CiviCRM hosting for several years for organisations small and large. Hosting plans with integrated “zero-click” installs of CiviCRM start at £100 per year. Read more about CiviCRM Hosting.

Planned CiviCRM improvements for 2012

  • Accounting integration improvements and Quickbooks integration
  • CiviMobile – CiviCRM for mobile devices
  • CiviSMS – SMS blasts and interactions
  • Mass Dedupe and Merge – Batch merging for groups of duplicate contacts
  • Multiple membership renewal reminders
  • Relative date filters for all search forms
  • UK Direct Debit Integration

These planned improvements rely on donations to the core development team, so if you can donate anything at all to help ‘make it happen’, you can do so at http://civicrm.org/mih. You can choose the specific feature you want to target so it’s very clear how your donation gets results.

Let’s a take a detailed look at these 2012 CiviCRM features

Accounting integration improvements and Quickbooks integration

This feature is the first step towards enabling better integration of accounting concepts and systems with CiviCRM. It  implements a number of data changes to make further enhancements possible, as well as providing Quickbooks integration via IIF file export (and integration with other packages via CSV export)

CiviMobile

CiviCRM for mobile devices. This includes iPhone, Android, iPad, Blackberry and more. This version will include the ability to view/search contacts and see most of the details of each contact. It will also have the ability to create/edit contacts, and handle event attendee check-in.

CiviSMS

Support for SMS blasts and interactions, targeting the following features:

  • Broadcast an SMS message with token support to a group of contacts via workflows similar to Send Email and CiviMail
  • Collect responses from the above message and associate it with the message and the sender
  • Validate and store the response as a survey answer
  • Integrate with multiple SMS gateways – ClickaTell, Twilio and Tropo

Multiple membership renewal reminders

Administrators will be able to configure an unlimited number of reminders at specified dates relative to the membership expiration, and configure different message templates as needed for each reminder.

UK Direct Debit Integration

Requirements and specification are being developed here:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Direct+Debit+integration+%28UK%29+requirements+and+specification

Will allow UK based non profits to connect to a UK based direct debit provider and process recurring direct debit payments.

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