Raw Notes: May CiviCRM NYC Meetup

Civi Updates & Announcements:

• first public alpha this Friday, code is pretty stable
• good changes in UI, features, functions
• CiviCRM book is "officially" coming out after book sprint in April, though it's already up on en.flossmanuals.net - it's bigger than Harry Potter! Includes broken out sections with step-by-step guides for everyday tasks
• Check out http://civicrm.org/groups/nyc for more info on the meetup group
• DrupalCampNYC 8 - coming up in July, already 2/3 sold out after one day! http://groups.drupal.org/nyc

Case Study: Phillip Bien - NYS Coalition of Social Workers

• NYS Coalition of Social Workers - formed by a handful of social workers to work directly at teh legislative level
• needed a new website to support advocacy costs, needed raise cash to do effective work to change the laws
• needed powerful professional website, membership benefits & incentives to join - all on a shoestring budget
• CiviCRM 3.1.3, Drupal 6, Dreamhost Private Server (LAMP) with PayPal
• wanted to build a longterm solution
• needed lower fees than a managed SaaS
• open source, strong track record
• Drupal ACL based on membership, abundant Drupal modules, CiviCRM better & better
• current site features: public site, memberships join and create site login, permissioned content types, downloads & docs archive, register for events, self-service contact info updating
• using entirely out of the box solutions for membership, events, etc
• Drupal modules in use: CiviCRM, CiviMember Roles Sync, CCk, content permissions, filefield, text, color, help, taxonomy, pathauto, string overrides, google analytics, views, views UI
• You could do this all without Terminal/CLI, cash, php, html, css, but you should get some help if you can!
• Future: want classified ads, membership cards, CiviMail, member and nonmember pricing for events and purchases, find someone else to work on the site, expire memberships on the first of the month instead of 365 days after join date
• Accomplishments: their legislation is on the Gov's desk for signature, got lots of new paid members, love the new site for aesthetics, ease of use for site visitors, org members, and administrators
• "NYC CiviCRM meetup provided critical direction to pull this off"

CiviCase Overview and Demo

• track interactions between your organization and constituents
• related to activities built into CiviCRM constituents
• CiviCase ties activities together to create work flows for activities related to constituents
• can create rigorous workflows with requirements for what needs to be done by whom in order to close a case
• good example of a feature developed for a particular group's needs and contributed back to the larger Civi community
• Right now there is no UI; need to configure an XML file to set up CiviCase, though there's good documentation online
• You can write import/export interfaces to import anything into CiviCRM, so case information can probably be imported (e.g. from Act) though entire cases can't be exported from Civi
• Rayogram created email inbox processing script to parse and create new cases in CiviCase via email
• Cases are made up of individual activities in relation to a CiviCRM contact
• When you open a case for a contact, you can describe the details of the case, assign a subject, select a case type, set a status, and create a start date and duration
• opening and closing a case is an activity; you then create new activities within the case
• Jack's thoughts about specific use cases for clients: CiviCase for grant application processes? safe space cultivation? pen pals?

CiviRelate

• created by FatherShawn
• Drupal module that allows logged-in users to create relationships to a new Civi contacts when they enter that new contact's information through a profile
• First using CiviRegister, another Drupal module which allows someone to fill out a Civi profile and create a Drupal login at the same time
• Does a dupe check and merge for the contact being entered
• Shawn used Coder to check his code
• module is currently in the Drupal.org CVS queue, but in the meantime you can find it on the CiviCRM wiki

Random Notes

• Check out Boost module for sending an entire Drupal site to static pages that are presented to anonymous users