Just a very quick post to let you guys know that the site that has consumed my life for the past 6 months has finally gone live. I am running a _very_ customised version of civicrm 2.1 on top of a drupal install. I'd like to thank all those that helped me to get to grips with the hows and wherefores of civicrm and for putting up with me on the irc channel.

The team has released version 2.1.6 stable with approximately 10 minor bug fixes.
 

NOTE: Due to a technical glitch - we are "skipping" 2.1.5 the release label. You can upgrade directly from any prior 2.1 release.

Download

You can download CiviCRM 2.1.6 from our download page. Select from the civicrm-stable section. The filenames include the 2.1.6 label: civicrm-2.1.6…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal / Joomla!). Select the Drupal download for Standalone upgrades.
 

Upgrading

You can upgrade directly to 2.1.6 from 2.1.0, 2.1.1, 2.1.2 or 2.1.4. We've also made a few changes to simplify the upgrade process a bit. Upgrade instructions are available on the wiki for Drupal, Joomla and Standalone.

If you're still running CiviCRM 2.0 - "making the move to 2.1" has gotten a bit easier as well (we've eliminated a few steps in the upgrade). Of course you'll still need to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 or Joomla! 1.0 to Joomla! 1.5. This could be a good time to look at requirements and support for any other components / modules you're using. Complete upgrade instructions for 2.0 sites are on the wiki for Drupal and Joomla!.

I recently finished writing an addition to the events system that will allow pa's etc to book places for people to events and then return at a later date to confirm the names. As far as I know, this is in progress for v2.3 but basically I need it now. Apart from some testing the system should work without too much trouble.

The team has released version 2.1.4 with approximately 25 minor bug fixes. You can see a listing of the issues included in this release on the issue tracker.

Download

You can download CiviCRM 2.1.4 from our download page. Select from the civicrm-stable section. The filenames include the 2.1.4 label: civicrm-2.1.4…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal / Joomla!). Select the Drupal download for Standalone upgrades.
 

Upgrading

You can upgrade directly to 2.1.4 from 2.1.0, 2.1.1 or 2.1.2. We've also made a few changes to simplify the upgrade process a bit. Upgrade instructions are available on the wiki for Drupal, Joomla and Standalone.

If you're still running CiviCRM 2.0 - "making the move to 2.1" has gotten a bit easier as well (we've eliminated a few steps in the upgrade). Of course you'll still need to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 or Joomla! 1.0 to Joomla! 1.5. This could be a good time to look at requirements and support for any other components / modules you're using. Complete upgrade instructions for 2.0 sites are on the wiki for Drupal and Joomla!.

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

The API was a big topic at CiviCamp. We had a good discussion on the mistakes we made in the past and things we can do better going forward. Due to a variety of reasons (internal and external), the API migration between 1.9 and 2.0 was a disaster. We resolved to not let this happen in the future. Here are a few things we agreed upon

• We will maintain backward compatibility for an obsoleted function for at least one version in the future.
• All interface changes will be part of the upgrade documentation along with a sample of how to convert from the old format to the new format.
• Good Unit Test coverage of the API. We will recommend a unit test be filed along with any bug report regarding the API. The developer community will step up and help provide additional unit tests for more coverage
• API's will have a more flexible critical bug criteria. In general, we need to do a better job of fixing issues in the release versions and trunk at the same time
• All Documentation will be versioned starting from CiviCRM v2.1. We will use Confluence's spaces features to enable this functionality.
• Matt Chapman will build a directory of existing CiviCRM/Drupal modules using D6/CCK/Views on civicrm.org. This can potentially serve as a testbed for CiviCRM APIs also
• There will be a separate forum board to address API issue. The forum topic is here
• We will migrate all v1 api's to v2 in 2.1.x (2.1.3?). The current v1 api's will be kept in 2.1 till 2.2 for backward compatibility. We will get the unit testing framework running in 2.1.3 for api's

We coded / migrated / bugfixed a few drupal modules as part of CiviCamp (blog reports here and here). We also decided to ship these modules with our 2.1 release. You can get the current version of these modules here. CiviCRM v2.1.2 will include the following drupal integration modules:

• Views2 integration. We've exposed the Contact / Email / Address / Contribution / Activity tables to Views2. We will add a few more tables over the next few releases and hope the community will step up and submit the needed code for the other tables. At some point, we hope to automate the generation of some of those files (from our xml schema definition).
• civimember_roles. We migrated that module into two modules: civicrm_member_roles which adds/removes a role from a drupal user based on their membership status. This is a one way synchronization only, and can be used to restrict content (and other CMS data) based on a valid membership. The other modules civicrm_group_roles does something similar with static groups. A user has a role added/removed whenever the user is added/removed from a CiviCRM group. This is a 2 way sync, so changes in a user role is reflected in the CiviCRM group, and changes to a CiviCRM group is reflected in the users role.
• civicrm_og_sync module. This module syncs the member of an OG groups with a corresponding CiviCRM group. It also has support to sync the "administrators" of an OG group with another CiviCRM group for permissioning purposes. This module was developed in 1.9 (for Democrats Abroad), but not officially supported. This is also a one way sync (from OG to CiviCRM). We will explore the possibility of adding the reverse sync in a later version

Another integration that would be nice to have is with CCK. Would be cool for someone in the community to step up and play a lead role in making this happen

I'm happy to announce that we've finally gotten our act together and configured a complete public demo for the Joomla! version of CiviCRM 2.1. Joomla! users and integrators will finally be able to try out CiviCRM for Joomla! without going through the process of setting up their own site. We think this will be a good step forward in strengthening the Joomla! part of the CiviCRM community.

The front-end demo site includes links to test-drive public-facing features:

• online contribution page
• membership signup page
• event info and registration page

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.

We have 4 more slots available for CiviCamp. CiviCamp will be held at Yahoo!'s San francisco offices (downtown, Sansome street, close to BART/Muni etc).

The CiviCamp agenda is on our wiki here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCamp+-+Oct+13-14%2C+2008. Some other details of the camp in prior blog posts

If you are a developer with php5/mysql5/drupal/joomla skills this camp will be of interest to you. Please send me email (lobo at yahoo dot com) if you would like to take part

Update: 1 slot left