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.)

For those of you who are thinking about ways you can promote your business as well as help support and grow the CiviCRM community :-) ...

DrupalCon 2012 is in Denver in March and the deadline for session proposals is October 26th (less than 2 weeks away). If you're planning on attending DrupalCon, and you have some exciting stories to share about client successes using CiviCRM + Drupal - this is a great opportunity to "blow your horn." You can also check out already submitted proposals for examples. It would also be great if a group of consultants were up for co-sponsoring an exhibit hall booth.

NTEN's annual conference is in San Francisco April 3-5 (starting the day after CiviCon North America 2012) - so you can easily attend both conferences. Several session proposals were submitted for NTEN, and we hope that they are accepted. In any case, it would be great to have a strong presence at the NTEN conference - including a booth at the "Science Fair" exhibit hall (April 3rd 3pm-8pm). We need some consultancies to step up to co-sponsor and help setup and run the booth.

If you're up for co-sponsoring a booth at DrupalCon and / or NTEN - ping me back ASAP and I'll get folks connected (dave at civicrm dot org).

... and please join us at the next Marketing IRC meetup - Friday October 28th at 3PM GMT (not BST!), 11am US/Eastern, 8am US Pacific, 5pm Warsaw, 8:30pm IST.

Over the past few years the administration menu has grown quite a bit. Although I use it quite often, I find that I'm sometimes unsure where to look for a particular configuration option. We've heard the same comments  from both experienced and new users - so Xavier Dutoit and I thought it would be a good idea to take a stab at re-working the menu structure. The goals of the re-organization are:

CiviCon London is only 1 week away which means it's time to draft a "State of the Project" presentation for the opening session. It's a good time to look up from our computer screens so we can think about and discuss goals for the next few years.

Our number one goal is to build a strong vibrant community which can sustain the project for a long time to come. We think this means folks from across the community participating in ALL aspects of the project, and the project becoming self-sustaining from a financial point of view. We are super-excited to see folks in the community taking on important tasks in lots of areas …

• Organizing CiviCon and UK Code / Book sprints
• API v3 team
• Accounting system integration
• Case studies / website redesign

For all you "customizers" out there - I wanted to highlight a cool new feature that is available as of the 3.4.3 / 4.0.3 release. You can now append jQuery functions, Smarty code, HTML (really anything) to any template without having to create a customized copy of the entire file. Wow - you say, "how the h?!# do I do that?"

All you need to do is put your "extra stuff" in a new file and save it as template_to_append_to.extra.tpl.

We had a lively meetup at Wikimedia Foundation HQ in San Francisco last week with a nice turnout (around 15 folks), despite the super crummy weather (again :-( ). Jackie Downing, Development and Communications Manager at the Gay-Straight Alliance Network shared their experiences implementing and using CiviCRM and Drupal. GSA Network empowers youth activists to fight homophobia in schools. If you've heard of the Make it Better Project - you've seen some of the great work they are doing.

The team is excited to announce the release of CiviCRM 3.3.5 - it is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site. Apart from fixing a few bug issues, this release contains two critical security updates:

• Cross site scripting problem, where the site can be exploited to execute arbitrary JavaScript.
• Permissioning vulnerability, which allowed anonymous users to potentially change information for another contact.

Please consider doing an upgrade as soon as possible to avoid potential security risks. If you have already upgraded using the 3.3.4 release package - and you did not experience any errors during the upgrade - then you already have the security patches installed and you do not have to upgrade to this release at this time.

A few months back we introduced the newly revamped and automated Professional Services listings. The listings are divided into two categories - Active Contributors, and Additional Organizations. We've had a few queries on how organizations get assigned to these categories.

Here are some criteria that come into play when we decide where to place an organization. We tend to look at activity for the past six months and give that a lot more weight.

CiviCon 2011 is shaping up to be an awesome event. The session line-up includes exciting case studies, CiviMail best practices for implementors, security session for developers, "ask the experts" panel and lots more.

March 7, 12 noon - 6pm
After party 6pm - whenever!
TechNexus - 200 S. Wacker Drive (in downtown Chicago)

Some great news to kick off 2011...

Each month, a project is chosen from the many thousands on SourceForge.net to be their Project of the Month (POM). This month's POM is ... drum roll please ... CiviCRM.

This recognition is another indicator of the growth and maturing of the project and the community. Thanks to all the folks - core team members, contributors, consultants, evangelists, book authors, bug hunters, meetup organizers - who have worked together to make Civi a success.

And if you think I'm excited, this is how Ken Zalewski who works with CiviCRM at the New York State Senate responded to the announcement ...

"WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!    That is absolutely AWESOME! Getting PotM on Sourceforge is HUGE! Congratulations to everyone on the CiviCRM team!"

Yeah - what he said.