CiviCRM 1.8 Update

The entire team has been focused on getting the 1.8 open issues queue down to (almost) zero items by next week - which is our target for code freeze. As of this morning, we're down to 18 open issues - of which several larger items are just about ready for our QA cycle. We've continued to get a few bug reports each week on 1.7 - but these have generally been edge cases or part of advanced developer features like hooks - so most are being addressed as part of 1.8 development. This reflects our general approach of NOT porting bug fixes to the current stable release UNLESS they are critical and affect commonly used parts of the application. The primary reason for this is that bug "fixes" can potentially introduce new bugs - so it is preferable to make fixes in code which is pre-production and which will be subjected to a full internal QA cycle along with our usual Alpha and Beta community-driven testing. Of course, this is always a judgement call / trade-off - and we hope folks will challenge us / give us feedback if needed. A few cool improvements have been squeezed in for 1.8 which weren't on the "final" roadmap:

• Multiple Payment Processors - Lobo has implemented the ability to configure multiple payment processors for a single CiviCRM install. This allows an organization to use a different payment processor and/or merchant account for each Online Contribution/Membership/Event Registration page - a feature which has been requested by some of the larger / international organizations.
• Improved Administrative Control Panel - With some "encouragement" from Marshall Newrock at Ideal Solutions, we've modified the administrator interface to give new users an expanded "view" with descriptions of each admin option, while giving advanced users a compressed "view" with easy (minimal scrolling) access to each option.

Personally, I'm looking forward to trying out the CiviReport functionality in the next few days - and hoping to discover that it's not too daunting to create and/or customize reports with this tool. The potential for allowing folks to tailor reports to their unique needs is quite exciting - and hopefully will reduce some of the burden on the Advanced Search interface. I'll report back shortly on my experiences - but in the meanwhile be sure a check out Robert Guerra's excellent installation documentation. Kudos to Robert for bravely pioneering this area :-) We expect to announce code-freeze and put up a public Alpha Release Sandbox next week so you can start playing with the new features - stay tuned.