CiviCRM 2.1.2 release with bug fixes, as well as a fix for a critical security vulnerability is now available for download. CiviCRM 2.0.7 a maintainance release fixing critical security vulnerabilities is also available for download. The vulnerability addressed could allow a remote user with insufficient permissions to access CiviCRM functionality via the API and / or command line scripts.

Upgrading your existing CiviCRM 2.0 and 2.1 sites is strongly recommended. Upgrade instructions are available on the wiki for Drupal, Joomla and Standalone

A 'bug fix' update for version 2.0 is now available for download. Version 2.0.6 includes the following fixes:

• CRM-3404 : Broken layout for Contact Edit form (under Safari)
• CRM-3403 : 1.9 -> 2.0 upgrade issues for Event Fees where event uses Price Sets

We released CiviCRM v2.0.3. This issue addresses a few issues in upgrade and fixes approx 20 bugs. We do not maintain a CHANGELOG (i think we need to start doing this), but you can see the list of changes here:

http://biryani.osuosl.org:8181/changelog/CiviCRM/branches/v2.0

v2.0.3 was released 29 days after v2.0.2. This is a pretty good indicator of the quality of the 2.0 release and we hope to improve on this even more in the 2.1 series with automated testing.

We estimate we've had more than 8000+ downloads of v2.0.x. We've received a ping back from 1200 sites, with a bit less than 66% being drupal and 34% being Joomla.

It feels like 2008 is the year of CiviCRM training. Following in the heels of our Melbourne bootcamp is the CiviCRM webinar bought to you by Michelle Murrain and the good folks from NTEN. You can read more details about it on the NTEN website: Learn More About CiviCRM: Can This Be Your Organization's CRM?.

If you are new to CiviCRM or have just gotten started with CiviCRM, this webinar is for you. Goto the NTEN website and sign up now :). NTEN has graciously offered CiviCRM users the webinar at the NTEN member rate. All you need to do is select CiviCRM User in the Where Did You Hear Field and you will receive the $25 member fee.

Here's our first draft at an agenda for the webinar:

Earlier today we pushed out v2.0.2 of CiviCRM. You can download it here. We have fixed approx 67 issues between 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 (this involved approx 170 commits). This brings us to a grand total of 504 issues resolved for the 2.0 series. We suspect (and hope) that the rate of bugs filed / issues fixed will slow down significantly for future 2.0.x releases. There have been some significant changes and improvements to the upgrade procedure, specifically with regard to activity history. More details on this can be found in this wiki page. We've also added code to give better messages in a few common error cases. More details on the blog post here.

You can follow these instructions for Drupal or Joomla

Here are some interesting / random stats with regard to the 2.0 release:

• We've been averaging 200+ downloads on a weekday. We crossed 300 downloads the day 2.0.1 was released. There have been 2800+ downloads on CiviCRM since 2.0 was released (12th march)
• 530 unique sites have pinged back with either 2.0 or 2.0.1 code (365 Drupal, 165 Joomla). We average approx 20+ new pingbacks on a weekday. This matches well with our random estimate of 10% of folks who download it, actually install it :)
• We are averaging 8K pageviews on a weekday (according to google analytics). There has been a nice bump in this since the 2.0 release.
• Forum traffic has been growing quite nicely. You can check the stats here

We think that 2.0 has been a pretty good relase are quite happy with the quality of it. We plan on fixing only critical bugs in future 2.0.x releases and move most of our focus / resources to the 2.1 release

We monitor the forums quite a bit and are always trying to figure out how to reduce / minimize the repeated requests. Many a time my strong stance on refusing to fix something obvious delays a few fixes (yes, i'm learning all the time and hopefully improving and becoming a wee bit wiser). I got a bit tired and fed up of seeing the same requests over and over again, so earlier today I went on a spree and fixed (or attempted to fix) a few of the most common support requests or mistakes. Without further ado, here are the ones we fixed today:

• Ensure that CiviCRM lets the user know that PHP5 is a requirement for CiviCRM. We need to detect this early enough and abort. Depending on the number of issues that arise with 5.0.x and 5.1.x we might make 5.2.x a requirement in v2.1.
• Ensure that the MySQL version has InnoDB support. CiviCRM running under MyISAM is pretty much guaranteed to result in data integrity issues after a few days/weeks/months. However this check is quite expensive and we'd like to avoid it on every page load. As a compromise we've added it to the admin page section and abort out there. In good conscience, we cannot allow folks to run CiviCRM in a non-InnoDB environment
• Joomla front end session support. This is a semi-hack, but hopefully it catches most cases. On any POST operation in the frontend, we ensure that the session is a decent size, if not, we abort and give a nice error message, with a link to the relevant documentation page.
• SMTP problems. Another frequent occurence on the forums. Folks dont seem to understand the incredibly cryptic error message. So we've trapped most of the smtp errors and display a nice error message instead.

One thing which we have not yet addressed is the "invalid key" error message. We hope some of the above fixes addresses that, along with us suppressing the drupal cache automatically in v2.0. This also breaks our rule of not adding a lot of new code after the code freeze. Hopefully these error checks dont introduce a lot more bugs (though the software engineering laws do dictate that a few bugs will be introduced because of this).

To some extent, I do feel stupid and bad that we did not implement all of the above traps in a earlier release. We do hope to learn, be more aggressive, trap and display more understandable error messages. Not being the owner of a package is not an excuse anymore. Feel free to call us out on other things we can do a better job with.

A minor typo in a php file managed to squeeze its way into the release (CRM/ACL/BAO/ACL.php, line 799 or so there is an extra 'x')

So we've released CiviCRM v2.0.1. We took the opportunity to fix a few other minor issues. We expect to do bug fix releases every other week for the next few months.

Apologies for the messup. Folks who've downloaded 2.0.0 need not feel compelled to download 2.0.1. Please use the following patch for your distribution: ACL Patch

lobo

After more than 6 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 2.0 Stable. You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our demo sites.

2.0 features significant code and schema changes to improve performance and scalability - as well as a number of exciting new features. You can find Release Highlights here, and check out the resolved issues listing for details on the 450+ improvements and bug fixes.

A big round of applause is due to all the folks who downloaded, tested and submitted bug reports during the 2.0 release cycle. The alpha and beta packages were downloaded more than 3,200 times - and our new ping-back mechanism reported 450+ unique installations. 100+ bugs were reported by community members and fixed by the team during the release cycle. This is a huge increase and improvement in community participation in bullet-proofing a release - and should help make this a high quality release. However, given the complexity of the architecture and schema changes - we do anticipate that a few more issues will arise during the coming weeks. We plan on doing periodic bug fix releases every few weeks as needed.

Earlier today at approx 6:00 am NZT (yes, we are early birds), we released CiviCRM v2.0-beta4. At approx 9:00 am, I saw a post from aaron about some missing files in the release. I downloaded and verified what aaron said and realized we had messed up big time :(. Our release czar piotr was offline and not reachable. Michal and I had to dive into the release code and figure out what was happening.

We pretty soon figured out that DAO (php files that we use to talk to the database that are auto generated from an xml schema description) generation was failing, however the script did not exit at this stage which is a bug. The process is quite sequential, and an error early on should abort the process. It took us a couple of hours to figure out the fix and test it. Testing was not as easy, since we had to simulate a release process but not actually release the code. Did not realize this, but svn operations are much faster on the local server than from a remote server, even though it was a url->url copy.

So while we were in the process of removing and creating beta4 multiple times to test, my itchy fingers managed to instruct svn to delete the v2.0 branch. That was a "oh my god" moment, what do we do now? We quickly remembered that svn was a version control system, and the branch was somewhere within the repository. A quick search for some other folks who made the same mistake gave us the need command (svn copy -r REV BRANCH_URL BRANCH_URL). We ran this on the server and we were back in business. We made sure our latest commits were in there. Things went smoothly after that, and we managed to get beta5 out there at approx 11:30 am or so. Not the fastest fix time, but we did manage to fix another beta issue (CRM-2776) in between. Dave was kind enough to do a manual download and test of the release.

The beta4 release was missing the DAO files. We've replaced the beta4 release with a new beta5 release.

The Beta 5 release of CiviCRM 2.0 is now available for download on SourceForge. As we noted in our blog, the 2.0 beta series has gotten really good community feedback and testing. However, we'd like to increase the number of downloads and installs for Beta 5. Check this out if you need convincing that downloading this beta is worth your time!. We currently have close to 300 sites that have tested a beta release. We'd like to see this number go past 400 before the final release.

If you've already installed 2.0 beta 1 or 2 or 3 - and have reported issues - please take the time to install beta 5 and verify that your issues have been resolved. There were no database changes from beta 3.

We hope that this will be the last beta before a final release next week. This is also the last opportunity for us to help you upgrade your 1.9 database. If we think your db has triggered a potential bug, we will ask you to mail us the database, fix the bug AND your database and mail it back to you :)

If you have some suggestions or comments on how we can improve CiviCRM usability, please post on our newly created forum topic: What part of CiviCRM are you having difficulty with right now?