After what seems to be an incredibly long time, we released CiviCRM v3.2 a few weeks ago to good reviews and not too many critical bug reports :). Now that is out of the way, we are starting to plan the feature set for v3.3

We've been fortunate to get a grant from Open Society Institute to help add some features important for Human Right Organizations, specifically for Front Line. We've been working with Front Line for a few years and this grant allows us to target their needs more effectively. Some of the features that are included in this grant are:

• Extending Address inheritance from Organization to an Individual (or from any contact to any other contact - TBD).
• Building Advanced Reports and Dashlets for Human Rights Organizations
• First version of Logging

We are excited to announce that the first BETA release of version 3.2 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember this is a BETA release and it should NOT be used on production sites.

This release includes several major new features/highlights:

• Usability improvements - Better looking and more intuitive Contact Summary Page. The new "Actions" button provides 1-click access to most contact-related forms. New clean and consistent icons have been implemented to provide helpful visual cues. You can now get a configurable contact summary pop-up from search results by mousing over the contact icon on any row. We'll be blogging with more details on these usability features during the release cycle.
• Support for PHP 5.3 -This release supports PHP 5.3.
• CiviCase Phase 3 - Thanks to the Physicians Health Program folks for pushing CiviCase to the next level! You can check out the phase 3 enhancements here.
• CiviEvent workflow improvements - Streamlining the workflow for events, providing 1-click access to event related screens from the configuration panel, and generating event name badges. For more details check CRM-6230 and CRM-6294.
• Free-tagging, and Tags for Cases and Activities - You can add one or more free-tagging "taxonomies" - called Tagsets - for use with contacts, cases and / or activities. You can also specify which tags can be used for which types of records.

The past few weeks have been just an amazing ride through the CiviCRM universe. We've had some excellent training sessions, an awesome CiviCon and then the sprints which produced a nice new book and some major improvements to our translation process. We've also been spending a lot of time thinking about what we want to accomplish with CiviCRM 4.0. So here are some of our thoughts, note that many of them are speculative and if something is really important to you or your org, consider making that part of YOUR OWN personal battleplan and contribute a design and code to make it happen.

My top 4 guidelines with regard to 4.0 are:

• No new features. 4.0 is a restructuring and refactoring of part of the code base. Our objective is to make the code base more solid and not focus on adding functionality to the application.
• Improved extensibility. We've heard the message loud and clear. We need to continue making it easier for developers to extend and customize CiviCRM. More documentation, More examples, More API's
• Improved testability. We need to continue increasing the test coverage of the code base. We are continuing with a strong push on this with 3.2 and have introduced Selenium into the mix. We hope to get the community involved in improving our test coverage in a big way
• Switch to a modern framework. The current CiviCRM code base is based on PEAR which is old and no longer maintained. We will upgrade the core libraries to a more modern object oriented framework, with a strong userbase / documentation / testability. To ease the transition we will stay with our current templating system but we will upgrade Smarty to v3.0.

The FSF just put out a press release recommending CiviCRM for non-profits. We've been working with the FSF very closely over the past 4 months to ensure that CiviCRM is licensing compliant (i.e. all the packages that we use and ship within CiviCRM are all compatible). This is an important milestone and a great endorsement for the project.

Some snippets from the FSF press release

Last Thursday, a dozen local CiviCRM users, developers and persons interested in learning about the system met at the NEXUS Resource Center to discuss the Boston CiviCRM training and challenges that we each have faced during implementations. Thank you to the The Green Roundtable for allowing us to utilize their space for this meetup.

Earlier today NTEN released the 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey Report (you need to be an NTEN member or pay $50 to access this report). Long time users might remember that CiviCRM came out on top in the 2007 NTEN CRM Satisfaction Survey. Some of the tweets about this survey include:

• @pearlbear: GPA on Donation Managment from #nten report: CiviCRM:3.85, Salesforce:3.67, Raiser's Edge:3.62, DIA:3.25, Convio:3.22.
• @geilhufe: CiviCRM gets straight As in 5/8 parts of an NPO's data ecosystem (NTEN Data Ecosystems
• @geilhufe: CiviCRM far ahead of competition yet again in independent Report
• @civicactions: Nice marks for @civicrm in the #NTEN 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey

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:

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.