JMaps, the successful mapping suite bringing Google mapping for some of Joomla's most popular components, has now been released for Joomla 2.5, bringing Google API 3.0 support for SobiPro, Community Builder, and more. 

CiviCRM is a fantastic system for managing contacts, eNewsletters, donations, events, and much more. It is used by both non-profit and for-profit enterprises that wish to use a CRM solution that works seamlessly with their Joomla sites. CorFun has successfully deployed CiviCRM for many different types of organizations. One shortcoming of the system, however, was that CiviCRM did not have a "lead" module that would allow site visitors to fill out a simple form requesting more information. That form should create a "lead" in CiviCRM and notify an internal resource that a request for information has come in. To fill this need - the CiviLead Module and component system was created!

CiviCRM is an outstanding CRM system for use with Joomla-powered Websites. The CiviMail feature is a powerful, robust way of sending emails for contacts within CiviCRM. CorFun has been very pleased with our projects that used CiviCRM for contact management, donation management, and eNewsletter management.  Despite being very pleased overall, CorFun noticed a huge drop off in newsletter registrations on every site on which we replaced a solution such as JNews with the CiviMail function within CiviCRM. Having a button to click to sign up for the newsletter, a link on a menu, and invitations in articles simply do not take the place of a prominently displayed eNewsletter sign up module. So CorFun coded one called CiviNews and made it available for both Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.7

Overview

Welcome and thanks for trying CiviCRM Newsletter Registration component and module. The purpose of this module and component is to:

• Show the minimum fields for signing up for a CiviCRM newsletter in a module position on any Joomla page. This makes the signup substantially easier and promotes more newsletter registrations.
• Optionally redirect the newly registered user to a Thank You page or to a page (generated via the component) that lets you thank the user and ask for more detailed contact information such as physical address and telephone number. Since this process is optional, it won't frighten people off from joining the newsletter, but lets those people who want closer contact with your organization to provide additional information.
• Optionally redirect after providing more information to a final Thank You page.

All users who sign up via the CiviNews process are added to CiviCRM as a contact and associated with any group chosen in the module. 

Details of Building a CiviCRM Contact

Contacts are added to CiviCRM in two stages. First, the CiviNews module prompts as for a user's name and email information.  When these are supplied, and the user sucessfully answers the Spam Questions, the system creates a CiviCrrm contact and associates the contact with a CiviCRM group.  For e-Newsletter registration, special contact lists, certain events, etc. this is all that is required. If that is the case, the module can either return a successful registration message, or the user can be redirected to a Donate page, a Thank You page, or some other page of information. The Redirect Link is set individually for each instance of the CiviNews Module, allowing it to be used for different purposes with different CiviCRM Contact Groups.