We had a lively meetup on Tuesday at Wikimedia Foundation HQ in San Francisco. There was pretty cool mix of organizations represented:

• board member and director from a "start-up" independent middle school looking to use CiviCRM and Drupal to support their vision of student - teacher - administration - parent collaboration
• IT folks from an association of psychoanalysts - looking to implement CiviCRM and Drupal for fund-raising and events
• two new developers from Wikimedia Foundation - looking towards making CiviCRM a more effective tool for their users

The focus of the meeting was review and Q/A on the upcoming 3.2 release. I walked through a slideshow of highlights - and we took frequent detours to my sandbox to dig deeper into features when folks had questions. I've been thinking that we've taken some big steps in usability and "polish" in 3.2 - and the reactions during the meetup reinforced this.

Folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are currently evaluating options for replacing their current suite of online tools. Their requirements include membership management, fundraising, email blasts and activism - and they would like to use open source solutions if possible (and they are already using Drupal for parts of their web presence). Their team has spent some time exploring CiviCRM's feature set, and Lobo and I met with them last week to discuss their findings, answer questions and evaluate fit and gaps.

About 25 folks gathered at the Wikimedia Foundation offices last night for our May SF meetup. We had a good mix of new and experienced folks, representing both organizations and consultants.

Heading back from NTEN's national conference in Atlanta Saturday evening - both tired and stimulated. I was one of 1,500 non-profit "tech" folks (they come in all shapes and sizes btw). CiviCRM (and open source in generally) are clearly more on the radar at NTC each year - despite the bombardment of logos, banners and booths by the large commercial closed source vendors.

CiviCon - the first ever 'global' CiviCRM conference - is coming to San Francisco on April 22nd. We're getting really excited about the fantastic array of speakers and sessions already on the agenda ....

• Nathan Yergler, Creative Commons CTO will be kicking off the day, sharing his thoughts about the importance of open source software like CiviCRM to the success of non-profits and grass roots organizations, why Civi is important to Creative Common's mission, and what the horizon looks like.
• Cedric Brown, Director of the Mitch Kapor Foundation, along with Mitch Kapor (via video link) will be closing the day with their thoughts on the benefit propositions of open source software.
• In between, there will be a lots of great user AND developer oriented sessions including:
  

The third BETA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Check out release highlights here!. (Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites.)

The second BETA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites.

This release includes several COOL new features:

• Personal Dashboards - ** NEW in this beta release ** Each CiviCRM user can now configure their own dashboard (CiviCRM Home) to include summary data that's important to their work. Any available 'CiviReports' can be embedded in the dashboard in tabular or graphical format. Check out some examples on Kurund's recent blog post.
• Contact Subtypes - Extend (and / or rename) the built-in contact types and create custom fields specific to a subtype (e.g. Staff vs. Volunteer custom fields). Thanks to the folks at Alpha International for sponsoring this much-requested feature (learn more...).
• HTML Emails for Receipts, Event Confirmations and more - Templates for all system-generated emails are now stored in the database and editable by administrators. You can easily add styles, logos and more to your emails.
• HTML layout overhaul for online contribution pages - Phase 1 in efforts to make front-end CiviCRM pages much easier to style / modify via CSS (learn more...). Thanks to Kyle Jaster and the folks at rayogram.com..
• Usability improvements - Streamlined DATE input and list sorting widgets. Prevent users from losing work by alerting them if they try to navigate away from a form with unsaved changes.
• Support for Price Sets in Online Contribution Pages - Provides the flexibility to incorporate more complex contribution options (e.g. "Contribute $25 more to receive our monthly magazine.").
• Custom Data Groups Extensibility - Custom data groups can now be shared between multiple types of Activities, Events, Participant Roles etc.
• Access Control for Reports - Access control list (ACL) based permissioning is now applied to report data.

The team has released version 3.0.3 stable today. This release includes 60+ bug fixes. We recommend that you review the list of fixes and upgrade your site as needed. New installations should definitely use 3.0.3.

Kudos to folks in the community who have reported and helped diagnose / fix bugs during this release cycle! Top bug hunter / squashers for this release include: Dave Jenkins, Graham Gilchrist, Jack Aponte, Joe Murray, Nathan Kinkade, Raphael Vering, Tim Otten, Will Brownsberger, and Xavier Dutoit.

A passionate posse of folks interested in advancing the state of non-profit software gathered this week at the Non-profit Software Development Summit. CiviCRM was a sponsor of the event which featured a full "track" of Civi-related events. Some civ-highlights from the conference:

• Helping some current users solve problems and get up to speed on more advance features in the CiviCRM 201 session. Our community does pretty amazing things in the "cloud" - but I really love having opportunities to interact with users and integrators and developers "live and in person". The feedback on 3.0 usability improvements (especially the new navigation menu) was super positive and very gratifying.
• Participating in Lobo's "action-packed" 60 minute session on Extending CiviCRM without Hacking Core. The more I play with all the things that can be done with our evolving hook functionality - the more excited I get.
• Joining with a group of CiviCRM integrators (and a few users) to brainstorm about Building the CiviCRM Community. This session was organized by the folks at Dharmatech - and partly inspired by a really cool book - The Art of Community - written by Jono Bacon who is the community manager for Ubuntu (a popular open source operating system distribution based on Debian Linux). It was exciting to collaborate in thinking about how folks with different interests and skills can potentially contribute towards strengthening the CiviCRM community and accelerating adoption of the platform. If you're interested in the ongoing sustainability of CiviCRM - I would encourage you to read Jono's book and think about what "team" you can join and / or create.

Thanks to Gunner and the team at Aspiration for organizing a great event!

The team is excited to announce that the first ALPHA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember this is an ALPHA release and it should NOT be used on production sites.

This release includes several major new features:

• Contact Subtypes - Extend (and / or rename) the built-in contact types and create custom fields specific to a subtype (e.g. Staff vs. Volunteer custom fields). Thanks to the folks at Alpha International for sponsoring this much-requested feature (learn more...).
• HTML Emails for Receipts, Event Confirmations and more - Templates for all system-generated emails are now stored in the database and editable by administrators. You can easily add styles, logos and more to your emails.
• HTML layout overhaul for online contribution pages - Phase 1 in efforts to make front-end CiviCRM pages much easier to style / modify via CSS (learn more...). Thanks to Kyle Jaster and the folks at rayogram.com..
• Usability improvements - Streamlined DATE input and list sorting widgets. Prevent users from losing work by alerting them if they try to navigate away from a form with unsaved changes.
• Support for price sets in Contribution - Allows the admin the flexibility to incorporate the more complex contribution options (e.g. "Contribute $25 more to receive our monthly magazine.").

... and lots of other improvements. Check out the 3.1 Roadmap for a good overview. Or you can review a compete listing of new features, improvements and bug fixes on the issue tracker.