The 2.1 release hits code freeze this week - and we're really excited about all the cool new features and improvements. For folks who haven't been following progress on the release with "baited breath" - some highlights:

• Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 6 compatibility
• 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 USPIRG)
• Contribution, participant and membership export improvements (with thanks to American Friends Service Committee)
• CiviCRM Home / Dashboard customization (with thanks to Front Line)
• 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 350+ other improvements and bug fixes. You can read details on some of these issues on our 2.1 tagged blog posts

... Karma and Sandboxes??

Pretty much everything in the 2.1 release is there because you - the community - requested it. And all this stuff is available TODAY for you to try out on the public sandbox. This is where the karma comes in.

• If any of the items in the 2.1 release are there because you said you needed them - we need you to be exploring and testing these features now. The easiest place to start that process is on the sandbox.
• If you see things in the release that you know (or suspect) will be useful for your organization (or clients) - ditto.
• If you're using CiviCRM and have been wondering how you can contribute to the project - and wind up with a better tool - spend some time on the sandbox.

Ok, so what should you do when you are trying out a new feature - or testing an existing favorite workflow to make sure it still works - and you think something is broken or not working as expected? Post your question or possible bug report to the new 2.1 Testing forum board. Your post should include:

• Details of what you were doing (with URLs for the sequence of steps and any inputs)
• What happened vs. what you expected
• A copy of any error messages

During this part of the release cycle, please do NOT post a bug report for 2.1 in the issue tracker unless you've discussed the problem on the forum or with someone on the team via IRC first.

What's next? An Alpha release of 2.1 will be available for download shortly. We'll announce that here and on the forums - and look forward to your participation in testing the release and the upgrade process in your own environments.

Finally, kudos to those of you who have been doing early review and testing using SVN checkout over the past month or so and uncovering bugs and contributing patches - including Chris Burgess, Aaron Crosman, Xavier Dutoit, Dave Lange, Chris Mott, Brian Shaughnessy, and David Strauss. Apologies to anyone I've missed - feel free to "blow your horn" here.