The team is excited to announce the release of 4.2 stable with support for Drupal 7, Joomla 2.5 and WordPress 3.3.

You can download the release from SourceForge, and you can also test drive the release on each platform using the public demos:

Following on our wonderful CiviCon day in Berkeley, several CiviCRM "evangelists" arrived at the Hilton Hotel in downtown San Francisco to help spread the word about Civi at NTEN's annual conference. Kurund and I arrived about 30 minutes before our morning session - "Is CiviCRM Right for Your Organization". The hotel was buzzing with non-profit technologists and vendors - lots of flashy signage for the large proprietary software vendors of course. But more importantly lots of folks who work in the incredible array of non-profits that belong to NTEN - networking, sharing, learning, looking for ways to help make their organizations work more effectively.

Several folks from consultancies that implement CiviCRM came to the session to help answer questions and showcase Civi projects - Frank Gomez and Michael Daryabeygi from Gingko Street Labs, Lisa Rau and Ashma Shrestha from Confluence, and Andrew Hunt from AGH Strategies.

Batch entry of gifts (checks, cash, etc.) is a much requested "missing feature" in CiviCRM. Thanks to a generous sponsorship commitment from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we are about to launch a Make-it-Happen campaign to implement this feature for the next release (4.2). We've spent some time discussing requirements with folks at EFF and several other organizations, and we've reviewed analogous functionality offered by several of the proprietary donor management products. The purpose of this post is to share the draft specifications for the feature and solicit feedback from others in the community.

Overview

The goal is to provide a streamlined interface for data entry of batches of contributions and membership payments. A simple batching concept will be introduced to provide verification of count and totals. The feature will use a grid-style input form with the columns controlled by a selected profile. This will allow sites to add or remove non-required fields in the grid (e.g. add custom contribution fields, add or exclude premium fields etc.). The current plan is to have a separate flow / input grid for batch entry of contributions vs. membership signup / renewal payments. This will help reduce the number of columns required for each type of input.

Thanks to a successful Make-it-Happen campaign the 4.1 release comes with a much improved and super flexible approach for running Civi's critical back-ground processing tasks. These tasks include keeping membership statuses up to date and sending renewal reminders, sending scheduled CiviMail mailings, sending pledge payment reminders, and more. I've spent the past 10 days testing and documenting the new "consolidated cron" functionality, and the good news is that I think it fulfills the promise of providing a convenient and friendly way to administer and run all the required tasks for a site.

The "bad" news is that these improvements are NOT backward compatible. The set of PHP scripts which were previously used to run these tasks have all been deprecated (and moved to a 'deprecated' directory). This means that all CiviCRM-related cron jobs will stop working as soon as any site is upgraded to 4.1. (Yes, a loud warning will appear on the screen at the end of the upgrade process.)