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Drupal and CiviCRM, the leading open source content management system and constituent relationship management system, can be a powerful combination to help your organization connect to, empower, and organize your constituents. We have a lot of experience with integrating Drupal and CiviCRM and have learned a lot about the benefits and hurdles you’ll encounter when choosing such a solution.

Following on the heels of T.J.'s post about Ned's experience using CiviContribute and CiviEvent, I accepted the challenge of putting together a mockup for a new default look for the first page of a CiviContribute contribution page. I had a lot of fun with this and think it'll be a great first step toward improving an already wonderful free and open source tool for nonprofits.

In this screencast I walk through specific usability changes and reasons why I'm proposing them. There are notes posted after the video as well (thanks for those, T.J.). Enjoy!

As detailed in last week's post, the first in our Drupal + CiviCRM series, we showed how in Drupal and CiviCRM we have two of the most powerful free open source software packages available to nonprofits. With an astonishing feature set right out of the box, both tools give almost infinite power to those who develop websites and systems with them--for FREE. Be sure to poke around their websites first and bop back here to read on if you're unfamiliar with either tool.

In the past year the team at HiDef has worked on quite a few projects that involved Drupal and CiviCRM. Our experience with the tools (the good, the bad, and the ugly) has prompted us to do a four-post series here about how they work and how they'll improve moving forward. We think the series will be beneficial for nonprofits, for developers, and for ourselves.

Drupal 7 has finally been released after nearly 2 years of development. This latest version of the popular content management system boasts many great enhancements for both users and developers. Personally I am very impressed with the enhancements to the user experience in the administrative interface. This in my opinion was the weakest area of past Drupal releases.

Drupal 7 is in Alpha 1 release currently and isn't recommend for production sites. However, I'd like to give a quick walkthrough of the new administrative theme "Seven" as it will give you something to look forward to for the first completed release.

Over the past two years HiDef has grown in size, but most importantly, in vision and purpose as an organization. In the early years of the company we were happy to take on any project that kept power running to the team’s computers and covered a few coffees every once and a while. Because we've worked with some wonderful organizations and realized our passion for helping great causes reach their goals, the meaning of our name--and now our website--is freshly inspired.