The team has been working hard to fix issues/ bugs as well as quite a few improvement suggestions reported by the community - and a third beta release of CiviCRM 2.1 is now available for download on SourceForge. We strongly encourage folks to download and test the beta release and help improve the final product. So test 2.1 Sandbox out now.

My self-appointed job is to hangout around here and complain about how CiviCRM could be more like Drupal or better implemented with Drupal. Instead of banning me from the forums and IRC for being annoying, Lobo gave me blogging access. So I'm writing to share about my latest campaign to Druplify CiviCRM.

Most of you are aware that CiviCRM collects version, CMS and an MD5 hash of the base url from a CiviCRM install. We discussed this feature in the blog post: Extending the Version Check Mechanism in CiviCRM 2.0. The CiviCRM admin can decide not to participate in the ping back mechanism.

Here are some useful stats that we've collected using this feature: We've got close to 4000 installs running CiviCRM v2.0. Approx 66% are Drupal, 34% are Joomla. We have 133 installs testing various versions of 2.1 alpha, 98 Drupal / 35 Joomla.

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.

If you haven't spent any time with 2.1 yet - seriously consider downloading and trying out the upgrade - as well as any and all of the new features you're looking forward too. It's a wise investment. Time spent now will help prevent frustration and hair-pulling down the road. As we get closer to stable release, we are less likely to fix non-critical bugs or implement even minor improvement suggestions - so getting your hands dirty now means you're more likely to be really happy with the release. AND, the team is much more likely to provide extra help with upgrades to folks who have participated in the release review and testing process.

 
Download or test out the release on the 2.1 Sandbox NOW!

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. If you do use CiviCRM for donor management, do take the survey and write CiviCRM in the other box.

The non-profit tech community is fairly small and most of us know each other. We did exchange email with Holly Ross (NTEN ED) and she explained that the survey was designed specifically for "software designed to fill the donor management function". She also did acknowledge that there are quite a few "grey areas" in picking what products to list. I'll refrain from nitpicking on some of the choices they've made, but in our opinion, CiviCRM does meet all the criteria that NTEN has listed. In addition it has a few more features not included in that list (including the brand new pledge functionality in v2.1)

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.

» 2.1 Installation and Upgrade Instructions have been added to Install section of the wiki

 

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.

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.

The American Friends Service Committee, where I work, needs to sync some information between our CMS (which isn’t Drupal or Joomla for various reasons) and CiviCRM. The vendor we’re working with is writing custom additions to the CMS to handle our needs, and part of that process is creating a PHP library to connect to the REST API of CiviCRM. When we asked, the vendor was very willing to open source that library.

As my Google Summer of Code project went past its midterm evaluations, I’m happy to report that the core of the multilingualisation mechanism will be a part of the upcoming CiviCRM 2.1 release.

For CiviCRM 2.1, the multilingual support will be rather basic, but still quite usable. You’ll be able to add language switching to you CiviCRM install, and once you switch from one language to another, certain fields will be able to have different values.