What do you think?
Rate this book
CiviCRM Cookbook
This book is written in cookbook style with practical, comprehensive recipes expained with the aid of the necessary screenshots.If you have basic CiviCRM skills and want to further enhance your CiviCRM skills, this book is for you.
236 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 17, 2013
I have been using CiviCRM for a few months now and whilst the online resources have been very good I have only found one published book on CiviCRM published by Packt Publishing, that is until now.
The CiviCRM Cookbook is a neat addition to your CiviCRM library. As its title suggests it takes the style of a cookbook and contains a number of different 'recipes'. In this case a recipe is a task that you would commonly want to action within your CiviCRM implementation.
Each task (or recipe) is a self contained instruction set of how to action that task. For example there are recipes to: Creating New Activities, Adding Custom Fields, Using Scheduled Reminders for Activities and Creating and updating SMART Groups.
This recipe format makes the book very readable and clearly lays out the actions needed, how it works and where you can get more information. I liked this approach and feel it will encourage people to keep picking it up to refer back to it time and time again.
With any open-source software the documentation is all the more important because you tend to have to install it yourself. Whilst this book assumes you already have CiviCRM loaded it is very good at covering a the tasks which most people new to CiviCRM would be trying to do and gives clear instructions to doing that.
One slight limitation of the book is that the recipes are based on CiviCRM being installed on Drupal, whilst this is not an issue for a majority of the recipes a small number of these are not suitable for those running Joolma or WordPress.
Overall, this cookbook is clearly laid out, easy to read and to understand. I hope this is the first in a series of cookbooks for CiviCRM and definitely one for the kitchen shelf.
The CiviCRM Cookbook is a neat addition to your CiviCRM library. As its title suggests it takes the style of a cookbook and contains a number of different 'recipes'. In this case a recipe is a task that you would commonly want to action within your CiviCRM implementation.
Each task (or recipe) is a self contained instruction set of how to action that task. For example there are recipes to: Creating New Activities, Adding Custom Fields, Using Scheduled Reminders for Activities and Creating and updating SMART Groups.
This recipe format makes the book very readable and clearly lays out the actions needed, how it works and where you can get more information. I liked this approach and feel it will encourage people to keep picking it up to refer back to it time and time again.
With any open-source software the documentation is all the more important because you tend to have to install it yourself. Whilst this book assumes you already have CiviCRM loaded it is very good at covering a the tasks which most people new to CiviCRM would be trying to do and gives clear instructions to doing that.
One slight limitation of the book is that the recipes are based on CiviCRM being installed on Drupal, whilst this is not an issue for a majority of the recipes a small number of these are not suitable for those running Joolma or WordPress.
Overall, this cookbook is clearly laid out, easy to read and to understand. I hope this is the first in a series of cookbooks for CiviCRM and definitely one for the kitchen shelf.
April 25, 2014
Master this web-based constituent relationship management software for nonprofit and civic sector organizations
Overview
Take your CiviCRM skills to the next level and handle CiviCRM efficiently Covers a wide range of recipes from organizing data efficiently to developing CiviCRM extensions Pracital, comprehensive, well-explained recipes with the necessary screenshots In DetailCiviCRM is a web-based, open source, Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software geared toward meeting the needs of non-profit and other civic-sector organizations.
Organizations realize their mission via CiviCRM through contact management, fundraising, event management, member management, mass e-mail marketing, peer-to-peer campaigns, case management, and much more.
CiviCRM is localized in over 20 languages including: Chinese (Taiwan, China), Dutch, English (Australia, Canada, U.S., UK), French (France, Canada), German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Swedish.
CiviCRM Cookbook will enhance your CiviCRM skills. It has recipes to help you use CiviCRM more efficiently, integrate it with CMSs, and also develop CiviCRM.
This book begins with recipes that help save time and effort with CiviCRM. This is followed by recipes for organizing data more efficiently and managing profiles.Then you will learn authentication and authorization and managing communication with contacts.Then you will be guided on using the searching feature and preparing reports. We will then talk about integrating Drupal and CiviCRM. You will also be taught to manage events effectively. Finally, learn about CiviCampaign, Civimember, and developing CiviCRM.
What you will learn from this book
Set up geocoding Add custom data fields Display a contact map Create permissions for administartors Create mail templates for CiviMail Add the external identifier field to full text search Create user accounts from contacts in Drupal Move a site to a production serverApproach
This book is written in cookbook style with practical, comprehensive recipes expained with the aid of the necessary screenshots.
Who this book is written for
If you have basic CiviCRM skills and want to further enhance your CiviCRM skills, this book is for you.
About the AuthorTony Horrocks
Tony Horrocks is the owner of Fabriko Limited (http://fabriko.co.uk), a web development company that specializes in CiviCRM and Drupal. Tony has worked for membership organizations for over 25 years and has been developing websites since 1994.
He now works primarily as a Development Consultant for the nonprofit sector.
June 27, 2013
The CiviCRM Cookbook is a collection of so called "recipes". Each recipe deals about a specific subject or problem in CiviCRM, and has a fixed structure:
- 1 or 2 paragraphs to explain the topic or problem
- a section "How to do it", with the actual steps to achieve the goal of the recipe
- a section "How it works", with some background information
- a section "See also", with links to online resources or other recipes in the book
The book is well-written, and the provided examples in the recipes make sense.
What I less liked is this cookbook format. I find this format too restrictive, because it leaves less room for background information. I prefer a regular book with a mix of explanations, examples and howto's.
That said, I found the CiviCRM Cookbook an excellent supplement to the CiviCRM guides (see http://book.civicrm.org/). From a practical perspective you learn about a specific topic, and the "See also" section of the recipe provides pointers to the CiviCRM User and Administrator guide or other online resource. Besides CiviCRM, you'll also learn about Drupal modules, OpenRefine, geocoding, cron, jQuery, LAMP...
- 1 or 2 paragraphs to explain the topic or problem
- a section "How to do it", with the actual steps to achieve the goal of the recipe
- a section "How it works", with some background information
- a section "See also", with links to online resources or other recipes in the book
The book is well-written, and the provided examples in the recipes make sense.
What I less liked is this cookbook format. I find this format too restrictive, because it leaves less room for background information. I prefer a regular book with a mix of explanations, examples and howto's.
That said, I found the CiviCRM Cookbook an excellent supplement to the CiviCRM guides (see http://book.civicrm.org/). From a practical perspective you learn about a specific topic, and the "See also" section of the recipe provides pointers to the CiviCRM User and Administrator guide or other online resource. Besides CiviCRM, you'll also learn about Drupal modules, OpenRefine, geocoding, cron, jQuery, LAMP...
July 18, 2013
In working with the nonprofit sector I've been intrigued by CiviCRM, which lead me to this book. Even though there's great online documentation to CiviCRM this book is a must for anyone planning to implement the software.
Tips on using this book would be to read through an entire recipe, heck even the whole book, before planning out your needs. Some recipes require a fearless disposition to tackle php code. While others are definitely no more than adding the right module & doing some tweaking -- beginner stuff.
If your considering CiviCRM at all this is a must have for your reference library.
Tips on using this book would be to read through an entire recipe, heck even the whole book, before planning out your needs. Some recipes require a fearless disposition to tackle php code. While others are definitely no more than adding the right module & doing some tweaking -- beginner stuff.
If your considering CiviCRM at all this is a must have for your reference library.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews