The team is excited to announce that the first ALPHA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember this is an ALPHA release and it should NOT be used on production sites.

This release includes several major new features:

• 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 Contribution - Allows the admin the flexibility to incorporate the more complex contribution options (e.g. "Contribute $25 more to receive our monthly magazine.").

... and lots of other improvements. Check out the 3.1 Roadmap for a good overview. Or you can review a compete listing of new features, improvements and bug fixes on the issue tracker.

Web redesign project

I took some photos at the recent CiviCRM Developer Camp in San Francisco. I have (finally) posted them online here: http://gallery.me.com/cap10morgan#100060

Penguin Day is coming to San Francisco on Saturday, April 25, 2009, right before the NTC. The agenda includes several CiviCRM-related sessions - both for folks just checking out CiviCRM, and for experienced users / developers. Several members of the CiviCRM core team and our new Community Advisory Group will be in attendance as well as - so it's a great way to make "civi-connections".

You can register now at the Penguin Day site.
 

Two new CiviCRM-related articles just got posted on the NTEN.org website - and might be of interest to folks...

Michelle Murrain writes about Open Source CRMs - How Do They Stack Up.

... and John Kenyon posted an article where he "puts a human face" on open-source software, and features an interview with yours truly (blush). Open Source Software - Who Makes This Stuff.

Most of you are probably aware that CiviCRM is developed and maintained by a team of dedicated developers spread around the world (India, Poland, USA and New Zealand). We have had regular team meeting over IM / Skype the past couple of years on a weekly basis. We figured it might make sense to try holding the meeting in a public forum so more community folks can participate in the development and running of CiviCRM. We plan on evaluating this after a few meetings to see if it's useful to the community and the team.

Our current meeting time is 5 am UTC on Wednesday May 21st, which means 5 pm in NZ, 10:30 am in India, 7 am in Poland and
10 pm (Tuesday) in San Francisco. We will meet in the #civicrm channel on IRC (irc.freenode.net). We try to keep the meeting time to 60 minutes or less. You can find more information on IRC here.

The agenda of the meeting is:

• Status and team reports. Progress on issue queue, any issues to highlight/defer etc
• Testing status from various groups (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Test+Coverage+-+2.1)
• Other items (Schedules, dates, consulting projects)

I'm on my way back to San Francisco after an incredibly stimulating three weeks of collaborating (and co-habitating) with fellow "Civi's". There were lots of very long days (12 - 15 hours) of brainstorming , designing, hammering out code... intermingled with cooking and eating some lovely meals together, a few cool adventures in the natural beauty of New Zealand, and some excellent meetups with members of the community "down-under".

This was our fourth "international" team gathering. In planning for it we tried to build on the things that worked best in our prior meetups - and learn from things that didn't work as well. We decided to focus tightly on a few key goals / projects - and worked hard at staying on task. (This meant resisting the gravitational pulls of email, forums, team members not with us etc.) We set a schedule for moving through our projects and decided up front that it was ok to move on to the next task without completing 100% of the current one.

We were already into some serious testing mode, when we started 3rd week of NZ Meetup. After deciding strategy for "CiviCRM Test Suite", we decided to split up into 3 groups.

Dave and me started specking out few new features for CiviEvent, that would be part of CiviCRM v2.1 release. We shortlisted 3-4 features based on community request. But after some discussion with entire team, in our 2.1 roadmap we would address :

Time flies - it's been already a week since we've been together in New Zealand, enjoying face to face conversations and working together. My personal take on communication is that there is nothing like real time conversation involving two persons located in the same physical spot, so I must say I'm really enjoying this opportunity to hang out with Yashi, Dave, KJ & Lobo.

I am a big fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, hence i was very excited about coming to New Zealand and exploring few Middle Earth locations. I must say NZ has some of the most amazing places I have ever seen.

Coming to work, a major focus of the NZ Meetup was improving usability. So we decided to tackle CRM-3000 - "Prevent reloads of new contribution, event registration, new membership, new relationship forms by Implementing dojo method to add custom fields to the form."