The team is excited to announce the release of CiviCRM 3.1 Stable. You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our demo sites.

The version number for the initial stable release is 3.1.1. There was an invalid 3.1.0 distribution on Sourceforge for a few hours. If you downloaded that version, please discard and re-download 3.1.1.

v3.1 includes several COOL new features:

By definition CiviCRM is used by many organizations in the political sphere. For those organizations working in the US one useful metric to have on your contacts is their congressional district. Up until now this has usually been accomplished with either custom code, or exporting your contacts, sending them through a bulk lookup tool, and re-importing them. There is now an easier way to get this with the CiviCRM Sunlight Congressional District module.

We have quite a few paid training events lined up for this year. You can read some of the reports on prior trainings on our blog. Participants who have attended these trainings have remarked as to how much it has helped demystify CiviCRM for them (and their clients). Learn some valuable tips and tricks from the core CiviCRM developers and help the project! We offer a User training mainly for the CiviCRM end user / newbie, an integrator training for the CiviCRM administrator and a developer training for folks who want to extend and customize CiviCRM. Our current training schedule is:

• Integrator (Jan 21) and Developer Training (Jan 22) in Boston.
• Developer training on February 8 - 9, 2010 in Brussels.
• User (April 7), Integrator (April 11) and Developer (April 12) training in Atlanta.
• User (April 18) and Integrator (April 18) training in San Francisco.
• The first CiviCon - April 22, 2010 immediately after DrupalCon San Francisco. More details on this in future blog posts.

The third BETA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Check out release highlights here!. (Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites.)

The second BETA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites.

This release includes several COOL new features:

• Personal Dashboards - ** NEW in this beta release ** Each CiviCRM user can now configure their own dashboard (CiviCRM Home) to include summary data that's important to their work. Any available 'CiviReports' can be embedded in the dashboard in tabular or graphical format. Check out some examples on Kurund's recent blog post.
• Contact Subtypes - Extend (and / or rename) the built-in contact types and create custom fields specific to a subtype (e.g. Staff vs. Volunteer custom fields). Thanks to the folks at Alpha International for sponsoring this much-requested feature (learn more...).
• HTML Emails for Receipts, Event Confirmations and more - Templates for all system-generated emails are now stored in the database and editable by administrators. You can easily add styles, logos and more to your emails.
• HTML layout overhaul for online contribution pages - Phase 1 in efforts to make front-end CiviCRM pages much easier to style / modify via CSS (learn more...). Thanks to Kyle Jaster and the folks at rayogram.com..
• Usability improvements - Streamlined DATE input and list sorting widgets. Prevent users from losing work by alerting them if they try to navigate away from a form with unsaved changes.
• Support for Price Sets in Online Contribution Pages - Provides the flexibility to incorporate more complex contribution options (e.g. "Contribute $25 more to receive our monthly magazine.").
• Custom Data Groups Extensibility - Custom data groups can now be shared between multiple types of Activities, Events, Participant Roles etc.
• Access Control for Reports - Access control list (ACL) based permissioning is now applied to report data.

Since the addition of the CiviReport component, we were thinking it would great if users could expose their reports on the CiviCRM Dashboard screen. Hence we decided it's time to redesign the CiviCRM Dashboard ('Home' page). Now it has a 2 column layout with the ability to add reports as 'dashlets'. We think this will be a significant usability improvement, and we've added it to upcoming v3.1 release. This feature will be available for download as part of the next v3.1 beta release.
 

Workflow has been an important piece missing from CiviCRM. We figured that integrating with the Rules module in Drupal would address this problem. I decided to tackle it on as a weekend project :)

Kudos to the rules developer, Wolfgang Zeigler for designing AND documenting an excellent module. The developer documentation is very comprehensive and along with the integration modules, i was able to write an integration module in a few hours. The source code for the module can be found in our svn repository

We hope to address and answer some of the integration questions with the community, similar to how the Views Integration Module has been developed. CiviCRM has got pretty good hook support, so I suspect adding extensive rules support is very feasible, i.e. fire rules based on CiviCRM hooks. We need to answer a few other questions to help us move this integration forward in a fruitful manner:

The team has released version 3.0.3 stable today. This release includes 60+ bug fixes. We recommend that you review the list of fixes and upgrade your site as needed. New installations should definitely use 3.0.3.

Kudos to folks in the community who have reported and helped diagnose / fix bugs during this release cycle! Top bug hunter / squashers for this release include: Dave Jenkins, Graham Gilchrist, Jack Aponte, Joe Murray, Nathan Kinkade, Raphael Vering, Tim Otten, Will Brownsberger, and Xavier Dutoit.

Some of you'll are aware of the work i've done for The San Francisco School using Drupal 6.x / CiviCRM 2.2. You can read more technical details about this project on my blog.

Database

• Maintain name/email/phone/address information for people associated with the school (students, staff and parents)
• Maintain relationships between parents and their children
• Maintain relationships between a teacher / advisor and their students

Current Features deployed at SFS

• Give all parents and staff a login/password
• Online signups for all Parent Teacher Conferences
• Online signups for all extended care activity (classes after school)
• Sign-in / Sign-out for students attending extended care
• Computation of how many "activity" blocks a student has spent on extended care
• Parent viewing of the various extended care activities their kids have attended in the past
• Online maps of "Where we Live" of the school families
• Online directories of the schools and grades.

A passionate posse of folks interested in advancing the state of non-profit software gathered this week at the Non-profit Software Development Summit. CiviCRM was a sponsor of the event which featured a full "track" of Civi-related events. Some civ-highlights from the conference:

• Helping some current users solve problems and get up to speed on more advance features in the CiviCRM 201 session. Our community does pretty amazing things in the "cloud" - but I really love having opportunities to interact with users and integrators and developers "live and in person". The feedback on 3.0 usability improvements (especially the new navigation menu) was super positive and very gratifying.
• Participating in Lobo's "action-packed" 60 minute session on Extending CiviCRM without Hacking Core. The more I play with all the things that can be done with our evolving hook functionality - the more excited I get.
• Joining with a group of CiviCRM integrators (and a few users) to brainstorm about Building the CiviCRM Community. This session was organized by the folks at Dharmatech - and partly inspired by a really cool book - The Art of Community - written by Jono Bacon who is the community manager for Ubuntu (a popular open source operating system distribution based on Debian Linux). It was exciting to collaborate in thinking about how folks with different interests and skills can potentially contribute towards strengthening the CiviCRM community and accelerating adoption of the platform. If you're interested in the ongoing sustainability of CiviCRM - I would encourage you to read Jono's book and think about what "team" you can join and / or create.

Thanks to Gunner and the team at Aspiration for organizing a great event!