CiviCRM

Dave Greenburg and Donald Lobo gave an insight into the current state of CiviCRM, I've tried to summarise.

Community involvement has grown significantly in the last year. Downloads have grown significantly and our professional services listings now has over 60 organisations providing civicrm services. The forum now has 15,000 and averages about 50 posts per day of which 6 of those most active are not part of the core team. Another great result is that there are many more patches being submitted meaning that more and more developers are contributing to the development of CiviCRM.

Today we are attending (as bronze sponsors) CiviCon 2011 in Chicago and the morning session was focused on where CiviCRM is today and where its going to go. As this is interesting to anyone either using CiviCRM or thinking about a CRM solution then we thought it useful to share the information.

Firstly, Kurund from the core team gave out a lot of thanks to the sponsors of the event and the core team working on CiviCRM.

Dave Greenburg, one of the co-founders then gave an update on the "State of the Union". Here are some highlights:

In 2010 the CiviCRM community grew considerably:

The start of 2011 seems to be going a bit conference crazy! Having the really fantastic (if maybe a little short-lived) experience at the New Adventures in Web Design Conference in Nottingham in January, March is the month of DrupalCon Chicago (more about that later) and just before that is CiviCon on the 7th March.

A couple of weeks ago I took part in the UK CiviCRM Developer Camp in London. It isn't until recently that we started using and implementing CiviCRM, a Constituent Relationship Management system into our sites, but a couple of clients were asking for something similar and so we gave it a go. I had tried it a couple of years ago on an early drupal 4.7 install and in honesty, I found it a difficult project to understand and with a development community that was somewhat in it's infancy. But things have changed...