After more than 7 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 2.1 Stable. You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our public demo site.
2.1 features a number of exciting new features, including...
Joomla! 1.5 and Drupal 6 compatibility (CiviCRM 2.1 is NOT compatible with Drupal 5.x or Joomla! 1.0.x)
Production-ready "standalone" version of CiviCRM (with thanks to U.S. PIRG)
Contribution Pledges (back-office and self-service)
Multi-language / single site support (with thanks to Google Summer of Code and the Joomla! team)
Nesting (hierarchy) for groups (with thanks to U.S. PIRG)
Contribution, participant and membership export improvements (with thanks to American Friends Service Committee)
CiviCRM Home / Dashboard customization (with thanks to Frontline Defenders)
Several usabiilty improvements including basic and quick search improvements (with thanks to CivicActions), and elimination of the annoying page reloads when entering contributions, memberships, and event registrations.
FCKEdit and TinyMCE rich text editors
Early-bird (date-based) discounts for events
Multi-participant event registration
Dedupe design and scalability improvements
New tools for developers to extend and customize CiviCRM - including form hooks, adding PHP to custom fields, REST support for selected APIs, DB-driven menus and more.
.... and 200+ more smaller improvements and bug fixes
You can find Release Highlights here, and check out the resolved issues listing for details on the 570+ improvements and bug fixes.
A big round of applause is due to all the folks who downloaded, tested and submitted bug reports during the 2.1 release cycle. The alpha and beta packages were downloaded more than 4,000 times . 250+ bugs and "improvements" were reported by community members and fixed by the team during the release cycle.
A special shout-out goes to some of the "heroes" who made significant contributions through both design and testing of this release - Mark Burdett, Chris Burgess, Matt Chapman, Peter Davis, Father Shawn (Duncan), Xavier Dutoit, Tony Guzman, Dave Hansen-Lange, Eileen McNaughton, Wes Morgan, Chris Mott, Brian Shaughnessy, Cynthia Tarascio, Elin Waring. This is another huge increase improvement in community participation in bullet-proofing a release - and should help make this our highest quality release yet.