Okay, so 1.8 stable has been released - and the roadmap indicates that it includes CiviReport Phase 1. You may be wondering... How does it work? What does it do? How can I try it out? etc....

We are excited to announce that our 1.8 release is now available for download, as well as testing on our demo site. We would like to thank our dedicated users for installing and testing the beta releases.

Kieran Lal from CivicSpace on Demand has made 1.8 Beta along with Drupal 5.2 available for free (mailing limit restrictions apply) on the CSOD web server. This is good news indeed and helps folks evaluate Drupal 5.2 and CiviCRM 1.8 without the install hassles. For more details you can read Kieran's post on the CiviCRM forums at:

CiviCRM 1.8 Beta sites on CivicSpaceOnDemand available for free

This has been posted by my fellow team mate on the forum, but I since we want as many translations as possible, let's make others know, here's a repost to our blog. :-)

Piotr Szotkowski wrote:

I’m happy to announce that the CiviCRM 1.8 POT and PO files are generated and that the CiviCRM 1.8 area is open at our translations server.

For people preferring the raw POT/PO files, these can be easily obtained from our repository.

Thanks a lot for your hard work and do feel free to bug us with any string issues in the new files!

Here's a snippet of the 1.8 beta release announcement. The complete announcement is here

We are excited to announce that our 1.8 Beta release is now available for download, as well as testing on our demo site. We rely on our dedicated users (that’s you) to install and test the beta in order to make sure we have a quality final release.

We are making pretty good progress towards a 1.8 beta release. A late breaking forum post revealed some bugs with the sql upgrade script. Once we are done with testing that issue, we should be pretty close to announcing a beta candidate for 1.8.

CiviCRM 1.8 is coming along nicely and we are more or less on track regarding release schedule. We plan for another alpha release early next week.

We are excited to announce that our 1.8 Alpha release is now available for download, as well as testing on our sandbox site.

In addition to many new features in CiviCRM v1.8, we have worked on few improvements for CiviCRM Profile.

1. We have added functionality which allows people to create User Account in Drupal using CiviCRM profile. So this way, user can create customized User Registration pages without using default Drupal User Registration form.

For more details: CRM-1633

2. Another interesting feature for profile is Option to Generate Email Notifications when a profile is created or edited.

The new de-dupe functionality, introduced in CiviCRM 1.8, is configurable under Administer CiviCRM → Duplicate Contact Rules. This post describes the meaning of the fields and the way their contents impact the de-dupe search engine.

The first decision to make after going to Administer CiviCRM → Duplicate Contact Rules is which rule to edit. For CiviCRM 1.8 we decided to allow one rule per every contact type (individual, organization and household); in future versions this can be extended to arbitrary list of rules.