The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

I've been running a non-profit using civiCRM for two years now and could never have accomplished what we have without it. I am so grateful.

Indeed, as noted below, version 3.0 and later is much, much improved. You should take reviews from before fall 2009 with a grain of salt.

civiCRM is an endless struggle or impossible on cheap shared hosting. But you really should not be running mission critical functions like your organizations web site on $5 a month hosting. Learned the hard way. (Moving up to $15 a month or so is sufficient at least for my organizations demands.)

Many of the features in civiCRM are really nicely implemented. It also makes some very complex things (sending a finely customized mailing or setting up registration for a paid event, for example) really easy and quick. It is not a simple program, but the complexity it has is complexity you really need to be employing if you are running a non-profit.

CiviCRM is not quite RaisersEdge, but it's definitely more in that direction than a simple database.

Lastly, while civiCRM has improved, this is indeed a big program (yes bigger than Joomla itself) and requires that much more technical attention. It's probably still true that it isn't for the faint of heart. But then, neither is making your non-profit successful! And yes, the support community is strong and pretty committed to helping you figure things out that you need.

This is great, should be part of Joomla core. It saves me time - I put buttons for all the things I do frequently that are several clicks inside a component.

I actually like this template better than the other admin templates JoomlaPraise has done in their paid club. It's noticeably faster (a real pleasure) and I like the layout which is simple and effective.

This template (and the other JoomlaPraise admin templates) make the drop-down menu completly disappear in the civiCRM component (which has a separate menu in addition to the regular Joomla admin menu). This will keep me from using this template, and I am quite sorry about it.