CRM API

It's extremely unlikely that there will ever be "A CRM" for Drupal because there are so many different perspectives on what that means: Is it a sales pipeline tool? A call center tool? A nonprofit management tool? Business to Business? Even the letters CRM mean different things! However, several concepts and data models are consistent across all CRM solutions. By working to identify overlap, the Drupal community can minimize duplication of effort on "core crm" functionality, while permitting the flexibility to implement industry-specific solutions.

Building a CRM system that is flexible enough for everyone, yet supportable for the long haul is a pretty big challenge. There are several different development initiatives, each with a different perspective on the problems, and each with a different set of developers.

In the interest of forward progress, we've agreed that it is OK to continue developing these projects independently, even though they might duplicate or even conflict with each other. But each of these developers values the idea of coming together to find common ground and areas for collaboration. There is a regularly-scheduled meeting for CRM developers to discuss their progress and ideas.

Heya "Drupal For Good" and "Drupal CRM Interested" folks,

I'm happy to announce that ThinkShout has just released RedHen Raiser (https://www.drupal.org/project/redhen_raiser), a peer-to-peer fundraising distribution built on top of RedHen CRM and Drupal Commerce. In shipping this solution, we also rolled new releases of RedHen CRM (https://www.drupal.org/project/redhen), RedHen Campaign (https://www.drupal.org/project/redhen_campaign|), and the RedHen Donation (https://www.drupal.org/project/redhen_donation) modules.

Trellon has released CRM Core Donation. This is the first major feature built with CRM Core. It includes the ability to create custom donation forms, automatic contact matching, and integration with Drupal Commerce. We will be rolling out additional features in the near future.

You can read about it and watch a video that demonstrates the creation of custom donation forms on our blog at: http://www.trellon.com/content/blog/crm-core-donation

CRM Core Donation is available at:
https://drupal.org/project/crm_core_donation

CiviCon is the annual, international meeting of CiviCRM users, implementers and developers to share knowledge, experience and to discuss the future of the project. This is the first year attendees will have 2-days to deepen their understanding of the powerful platform and their connections with the CiviCRM community.

When: April 25th, 2013 8:30 AM through April 26th, 2013 5:30 PM

Location:

David Brower Center
2150 Allston Way
Berkeley, CA 94704

Hi RedHen users,

I just got back from NTEN's annual Nonprofit Technology Conference. There is a ton of interest in RedHen and a few larger nonprofits as well as a handful of larger Drupal shops interested in leveraging RedHen on large-scale Drupal-CRM projects. It's great to see RedHen gain traction and ThinkShout is very interested in supporting other developers who seek to contribute to the project.

What is CRM Core?

CRM Core is a set of modules for managing contact records within a Drupal site, providing support for contacts, relationships and activities. It provides basic CRM system components and a framework for extending these components to build a custom system that will allow an organization to effectively meet their needs with respect to contact, relationship, and activity tracking.

What Does it do?

We will have a CiviCRM sprint from Nov 5th - Nov 9th in San Francisco. The idea is to have as many community members present so we can achieve lots and make all of us happy! We will provide ample coffee, drinks and snacks!

You can take part for any number of days, and you will find a list of topics here:

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,26267.0.html Please add the topics you are interested in! We will work on usability, documentation, workflows and a bit of code.

Please register here: http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=237

Meetup Agenda

• Civi "Help Desk" (5:00 - 6:00pm) - bring in your pressing CiviCRM questions and issues and we'll try to help.
• Report back from CiviCon London and sprints.
• Preview of cool stuff coming in the 4.3 release.

Please register here: http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=239

Hello everyone following the CRM API stuff,
A while back there was a "Drop CRM" initiative from Copenhagen where people tried to put together a framework for people to build CRM systems on top of Drupal. At DrupalCon London a bunch of us met together and decided to go our separate ways (work that needed to be done right away for clients took precedent over trying to do something now that pleased everyone in the CRM community).

Another catch up meeting.

Another Party meeting!

I thought I'd book this one in earlier so we people can plan things around it. Party development is going at full swing.

Feel free to say if we should do this meeting at a different time in the future from now on if fridays don't quite work for you.

We haven't had one of these for a while! I don't know if others from the CRM community will join so for now we'll just do a catch up.

We're planning to give some time to cleaning up the issue queue and getting the features of what is in party more stable. So it would be great if anyone who had an idea of what they felt was important could come along and say so.

If you can't make it what we're planning is:

1) Getting the Party Dashboard in core properly (separating out what needs to be separated)

Looking to do a BoF tomorrow at Capital Camp on native CRM solutions for Drupal. I'll ping this thread with the details once I have a time/location. If you're interested, LMK.

Sean

http://twitter.com/sean_larkin

Modules Unravelled just completed its fourth podcast on open source CRM solutions in Drupal. They cover CiviCRM, Party, RedHen CRM and CRM Core. The content is great. I highly recommend that you check them out if you're interested in this work:

http://modulesunraveled.com/podcast

For those of us that have been to any Drupal Camp in the UK for the last year you'll probably notice a group of CRM Party people who have been going on about the Party module for some time. Things are taking off and we think it would be good to organise a dedicated Party Sprint as we move past the planning stage and into the coding like crazy stage.

Before I create the event I thought I'd give other the opportunity to get involved in discussing this. Should we make it co-incide with some other UK event? Does someone want to organise something for Munich?

We haven't had one of these meetings in a while. Originally these meetings were for all CRM people but not they have become more like Party meet ups however everyone is welcome if you've done something in CRM and want to chat about it feel free to join us.

Work on the Party module is going full steam ahead with multiple different companies working on it together. We're still not at a point of release although we do have one client using it in production.

After 800 hours of development, ThinkShout's proud to announce the Alpha1 release of RedHen CRM - a native CRM framework for Drupal 7.

For more information, please check out our two-part blog post describing the architecture and feature set:

http://thinkshout.com/blog/2012/06/sean/redhen-crm-part-1

http://thinkshout.com/blog/2012/06/sean/redhen-crm-part-2

You can also learn more about the project on D.O at: http://drupal.org/project/redhen.

Tonight at 6:30pm PST Lev Tsypin from ThinkShout will be hosting a RedHen CRM BoF as part of Open Source Bridge here in PDX.

If you're in town and interested, please check it out:

http://opensourcebridge.org/sessions/930

Last Tuesday I did a 20 minute demo of RedHen CRM at the PDUG meetup here in PDX.

This demo was based upon a sandbox sample install profile (and make file) at:

http://drupal.org/sandbox/seanberto/1490420

We'd love for you to check out the project. The sandbox is a lot like Commerce Kickstarter, in that it simply provides an example of what you can do with RedHen.

A quick run down of what you might want to check out in the distro:

• Ability to manage custom entity bundles for contacts and organizations.