Admin Training: Community Resources
This note contains links to the online CiviCRM community resources I'll be mentioning in the upcoming CiviCRM Admin Training at CiviCamp Toronto 2026.
Whether you're attending that training or not, you might still find these resources useful.
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Having a community of people around you is a huge advantage for learning.
Fortunately, you don't even have to change out of your pajamas these days to find an online community of people a lot like you who are making great things happen with CiviCRM.
The online CiviCRM community is active, communicative, and in my experience very supportive.
If you want to accelerate your journey in mastering CiviCRM, I recommend you check out these online community resources:
CiviCRM Extensions Directory:
When you need CiviCRM to do something it doesn't do out of the box, you don't always have to build it yourself. The CiviCRM Extensions Directory contains over 700 extensions for everything from visual layout tweaks to import/export helpers, specialized PDF creation, calendars, and more. They're all available for you to try, and to continue using indefinitely at no cost.
Community chat:
CiviCRM’s online chat platform is the closest thing we have to an online forum, with separate channels for a wide variety of topics.
Need help with Mosaico, or something Drupal-specific, or financials, or general system administration? There are dedicated channels for those topics, and lots more.
Just trying to figure out where you fit in with this new community? Try the Town Square channel, where "all things CiviCRM" are on-topic; or even the Off Topic channel, for "Random chit-chat about anything at all".
It's sometimes just referred to as "MatterMost", the name of the software that powers the chat platform. It works about like Slack, in case you've used that elsewhere. If someone in the CiviCRM community suggests asking on MatterMost, they just mean chat.civicrm.org.
You can just use it easily in your browser, but dedicated desktop and mobile apps (look for "MatterMost") make it even easier.
CiviCRM documentation:
CiviCRM's official documentation is free — free to access, free to distribute to your staff, free to modify and reuse as you see fit.
And if you want to make the most of CiviCRM, you'd be well served by becoming very familiar with what it can do right out of the box.
The documentation is also quite extensive. So it can feel like a lot to consume.
But it's well organized, divided into several Guides covering major areas:
User Guide: For staff members who use CiviCRM's web-based interface as part of their job at an organization.
Installation Guide: For anyone who wants to install CiviCRM on a compatible CMS.
System Administrator Guide: For tech-savvy people who install, upgrade, and maintain CiviCRM for an organization.
Training Guide: For CiviCRM trainers who train users, system administrators, and developers who would like to learn more about configuring and using CiviCRM.
Developer Guide: For developers (programmers) who create and improve functionality within CiviCRM or those wishing to write software code for CiviCRM.
CiviCRM Stack Exchange:
Have a question that you just can't seem to get answered? The CiviCRM Stack Exchange is a dedicated Q&A forum for exactly that: getting your questions answered.
It's not a general forum for open-ended conversation; it's designed to get "the one best answer" to a specific answerable question.
Questions and answers are all provided by real people in the CiviCRM community — from complete noobs to seasoned experts. There's no guarantee that you'll get a perfect answer, but it's a great place to start, and often turns up exactly what you need to know.
Community Blog:
The CiviCRM blog is the primary source for news and announcements in the CiviCRM community. You'll learn about upcoming events, new features, new extensions, and more. (You'll also see a quick link to all the latest blog posts in the "CiviCRM News" dashlet within your own CiviCRM dashboard.)
Developers’ workspace, “CiviCRM GitLab”:
This is CiviCRM’s online repository for code development, bug reports, and community planning.
Even if you're not a software developer, this is still a great resource for learning about new feature improvements and new bug fixes that are in the works — or completed.
And you don't have to be super technical to file a bug report either. If you're sure that CiviCRM should be behaving in a certain way and isn't, there may be an existing bug report that you can add to, or you can file one yourself.
Ultimately, CiviCRM is just a bunch of code files. Peeking into that world now and then is like learning a little more about your car’s engine or your household plumbing:
You don't always have to be the one to pull out the tools, but it can help to have some idea what's inside when it's acting strangely.
Conversational AI, “CiviCRM DocBot”:
Official CiviCRM documentation (linked above) is great. But it's a lot to digest.
CiviCRM DocBot solves this problem by offering an AI-driven conversational interface. Ask it a question. Give as much detail as you like. DocBot's answers are based on the full contents of the official documentation, plus documentation from many extensions, plus ongoing Q&A from the CiviCRM StackExchange, and more.
For more convenience, the DocBot extension will give you a DocBot interface right on your CiviCRM dashboard. Very useful for detailed answers to complex and detailed questions.
All the best,
A.