Hintonblogger

I know this is kind of a line of product releases, but Moodle, Drupal, and CiviCRM are just awesome pieces of software that help make the Internet an incredible tool for collaboration and communication. I have to give them a shoutout when they deserve it, and CiviCRM's 2.0 release definitely deserves it.

I built a member registration site for our local ISTE affiliate here in Arizona, AzTEA. Of course I used Drupal and, since they were wanting a customer contact manager that allowed registration signups, membership renewals, etc, I thought CiviCRM would be a natural fit.

There have certainly been some growing pains, but overall, it certainly is bringing some order into a space that has been unwieldy to manage previously. One of my biggest hangups has been CiviCRMs inability to handle online signups while tracking an offline payment option (check or purchase order being the two major ones). With the release of the new CiviCRM 2.0 release, that hangup has been taken care of as well as numerous other improvements.

Combining those improvements with moving the site to a new VPS on Wiredtree, and toss in a new Drupal module called Resource Conflict (which will aid in the scheduling of presentations at our conferences) and I think the AzTEA member site will continue to be more useful as a membership coordination tool. I'm looking forward to the site upgrade and move to the new VPS as well as implementing the new features. I'll let you know how it goes.