Improvements to CiviCRM that benefit nonprofit organizations world-wide

Over the past few months, Cividesk has made improvements and completed bug fixes in report templates as suggested and sponsored by our customers. Not only do all Cividesk clients benefit from these improvements but so does the entire CiviCRM community. We have already contributed these changes to the CiviCRM Core software as part of our committment as a Sustaining Contributor.

New features include:

• Allow filters to search on NULL/NOT NULL: The filters in CiviCRM report templates did not previously show this criteria for options with list values (selects/checkbox/radio elements)
• Allow support for IS NULL/ NOT NULL filters for the report URL query string for options with list values: Filters can be passed via url for is null/is not null for fields like campaigns, etc
• Allow billing name for contributions to be searched: This feature has been implemented in the report templates provided by the extension Extended Reports
• Expose 'Registered by Participant Name' field in Event report templates: Until now, it was only possible to get the 'Registered by Participant ID' but not the actual participant name
• Expose contribution page in 'Contribution Summary' report template
• Allow report results to show disabled options 

Also, Cividesk has been actively involved in "code clean up" and "code refactoring" (restructuring existing code) for reports used in CiviCRM. As CiviCRM software evolves by including more and more features, it becomes clear that parts of the code have become unwieldy and must be refactored in order to support future features and changes.

Code refactoring for open-source software is essential to improve code readability, reduce complexity and improve code maintainability. so it's easier for any contributor to extend the capabilities and to fix bugs. The longer refactoring is delayed, and the more code is written, the more "debt" must be paid at the time the refactoring is complete.

We are very proud to have paid our "technical debt" so that all organizations world-wide who use CiviCRM can benefit from more robust and reliable reports to analyse their data.