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.

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.
 

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.

Worried that CiviCRM integration with Joomla is not keeping pace with Drupal? Wanna take CiviCRM / Joomla integration to the next level? Want better permissioning support for CiviCRM in Joomla? Want more front end exposure of CiviCRM in Joomla?

If you want any (or all of the above), then do attend the Joomla Develoepr Conference in New York from Dec 5 - 7. We definitely need more participation and support from the CiviCRM/Joomla Developer community to help bridge the gap and strengthen the integration. This is a great time and moment for CiviCRM/Joomla to take the next leap forward.

Details and event registration are found here: http://opensourcematters.org/devconferenceinformation.html (note the reg form uses Civi for event info/registration!).

We are looking to put together a team of Joomla+CiviCRM developers to attend and work together at the camp. We currently have 2 confirmed developers attending the camp, and need at least 2-3 more developers to make progress on any of the above topics. You have to be experienced with PHP and be familiar with the internals of CiviCRM or Joomla to help out.

For those of you who are non-programmers, encourage / sponsor / coerce your local programmer / consultant / development partner to attend the conference

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!