Thanks to Oliver Gibson (ICT champion for North West England) for finding us a venue for the next CiviCRM UK usergroup: Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisations (GMCVO) from 2.00 to 4.30pm on 30th September.

There have been a few interesting developments with CiviCRM in the UK over the past few months, so this should be an interesting meeting and a good chance to catch up. Like last time, the agenda will be quite open, and a report from the meet up available on the CiviCRM Wiki afterwards.

The team has been working hard to fix issues/ bugs as well as quite a few improvement suggestions reported by the community - and a third beta release of CiviCRM 2.1 is now available for download on SourceForge. We strongly encourage folks to download and test the beta release and help improve the final product. So test 2.1 Sandbox out now.

My self-appointed job is to hangout around here and complain about how CiviCRM could be more like Drupal or better implemented with Drupal. Instead of banning me from the forums and IRC for being annoying, Lobo gave me blogging access. So I'm writing to share about my latest campaign to Druplify CiviCRM.

The CiviCRM team branched off v2.1 late last week. We hope to knock off most of the remaining v2.1 issues over the next few days and release the the first beta candidate. Please do help us out by downloading and testing the release OR testing it on our sandbox site. Your help does help make it a more solid and stable release.

This also means that the core team can start working on CiviCRM v2.2. After a 6 week code freeze / QA / alpha cycle, the developer team is typically ready to go and start working on new things. The list of currently open issues for 2.2 can be found on our issue tracker. Please do add your suggestions and requests to the Feature Requests and Suggestions board. As with any open source projects, requests and suggestions with attached patches/sponsorships are more likely to make it into the release.

Most of you are aware that CiviCRM collects version, CMS and an MD5 hash of the base url from a CiviCRM install. We discussed this feature in the blog post: Extending the Version Check Mechanism in CiviCRM 2.0. The CiviCRM admin can decide not to participate in the ping back mechanism.

Here are some useful stats that we've collected using this feature: We've got close to 4000 installs running CiviCRM v2.0. Approx 66% are Drupal, 34% are Joomla. We have 133 installs testing various versions of 2.1 alpha, 98 Drupal / 35 Joomla.

The fourth (and probably final) 2.1 Alpha distribution is now available for download. We've gotten a decent amount of feedback from our community testers and reviewers - and have addressed almost all reported bugs as well as quite a few improvement suggestions.

If you haven't spent any time with 2.1 yet - seriously consider downloading and trying out the upgrade - as well as any and all of the new features you're looking forward too. It's a wise investment. Time spent now will help prevent frustration and hair-pulling down the road. As we get closer to stable release, we are less likely to fix non-critical bugs or implement even minor improvement suggestions - so getting your hands dirty now means you're more likely to be really happy with the release. AND, the team is much more likely to provide extra help with upgrades to folks who have participated in the release review and testing process.

 
Download or test out the release on the 2.1 Sandbox NOW!

A 'bug fix' update for version 2.0 is now available for download. Version 2.0.6 includes the following fixes:

• CRM-3404 : Broken layout for Contact Edit form (under Safari)
• CRM-3403 : 1.9 -> 2.0 upgrade issues for Event Fees where event uses Price Sets

David Geilhufe (full disclosure: he is on the board of Social Source Foundation, the non-profit behind CiviCRM) has written a good article on What is Donor Management Software. The article discusses some of the potential reasons on the exclusion of CiviCRM from the list of software products. If you do use CiviCRM for donor management, do take the survey and write CiviCRM in the other box.

The non-profit tech community is fairly small and most of us know each other. We did exchange email with Holly Ross (NTEN ED) and she explained that the survey was designed specifically for "software designed to fill the donor management function". She also did acknowledge that there are quite a few "grey areas" in picking what products to list. I'll refrain from nitpicking on some of the choices they've made, but in our opinion, CiviCRM does meet all the criteria that NTEN has listed. In addition it has a few more features not included in that list (including the brand new pledge functionality in v2.1)

The last part of my Summer of Code project was multi-langage editing of the internationalised fields. The aim of this task was to be able to edit all language versions of a given field (say, a given contact’s first name) in a centralised place.

Do you use Drupal/CiviCRM or Joomla/CiviCRM to manage your donors? Do you think CiviCRM is a good fit for your donor management software needs? Show your appreciation for CiviCRM/Drupal/Joomla and open source software by taking part in the NTEN Donor Management Survey. We got a pretty good grade in the NTEN CRM Survey (read more about it at: CiviCRM comes out on top in NTEN Survey). The current version, v2.0 and the upcoming version v2.1 are significantly better than the version when the previous survey was done (v1.7)

PLEASE NOTE: NTEN does not consider CiviCRM donor management software (?!) so you will need to "write in" CiviCRM. Will be cool to come out with high grades as the write-in candidate :)

The below is the email NTEN sent out earlier today: