After much anticipation, the Drupal distribution for community and campaign websites, CivicSpace, has released its new version. The exciting development here is the integration of CiviCRM, the Open Source Customer/Client/Community/ "Constituent Relationship Manager." While a Drupal module managing such integration is available, what's new is that CivicSpace has it integrated in the basic installation already.

The trend online is towards more use of online applications to do our work. Adding a CRM may seem odd to folks who think of websites still as being just brochures or blogs. But when you have a community site with dozens or hundreds or more people using the same data core, it's a natural development for community sites to start empowering users with collective information and networking tools that traditionally have remained in the realm of intranets.

If you're curious about CiviCRM, check out the demo. Maybe it's something you want to implement on your website.

[Note: This new release incorporates the latest Drupal security updates. (Supported hosting clients: your sites have already been updated.)]

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