Blogues

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.

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.

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.

The team has rolled a second 2.1 Alpha distribution with lots of fixes and improvements based on feedback from our heroic alpha testers out there, and our ongoing internal QA blast. We've gone through verification of almost 800 issue-tracker items - with each team member verifying a set of issues in an area where they did NOT do the coding. This process has turned up quite a few edge case issues - and the release is definitely getting more solid every day! Alpha 2 is available for download, AND to try out on our sandbox site. We want to make sure that the upgrade to 2.1 is as painless and error-free as possible. This can only happen if YOU test the upgrade process against a copy of your 2.0 data.

It was 6th August 2008, CiviCRM team was getting ready for first alpha release of version 2.1. You could feel the tension and sense the responsibility on everyone's face. Although it was an alpha release, each one wanted to close their outstanding issues / bugs. We were trying to get Open Issues count below 10 and wanted to close as much QA issues as possible.

Long time no blog – partly because I was traveling in the USA most of July, partly because we were busy finishing last CiviCRM 2.1 features.

For several years there has been interest in integrating a virtual call centre or distributed phone bank capacity into CiviCRM. Rob Thorne did a proof of concept back in March 2007 tha was used a bit by a political party (http://cvdemo.torenware.com/). There has been a resugence of interest in recent months and weeks, with over 2 dozen posts and 2300 page views on a single forum thread.

We are excited to announce that the initial Alpha release of 2.1 is now available for download, AND to try out on our sandbox site. We're really excited about all the cool new features and improvements. Check out Dave's last blog for some highlights... or the 2.1 Roadmap for a more complete listing.

We strongly encourage folks to download and test the alpha release and help improve the final product. Upgrading to 2.1 requires a simultaneous upgrade of Drupal to 6.3, and we need test-drivers who can help us iron out any bleeps or burps that we haven't discovered in our own testing. You can contribute significantly to the project by testing the upgrade process against a copy of your 2.0 data, as well as running your regular tasks on an upgraded site.