Onwards and Upwards...

Those of you who've been using CiviCRM for a while and/or following the progress of the project already know that there's never a dull moment around here. It's only a few days after the release of 1.7 stable - and we're well into work on the NEXT release (1.8). We are working on a compressed timeline for 1.8 - targeting beta in June - so we've had to take a hard look at what we can and can't accomplish. We've postponed several of the larger and more complex items to 2.0 - where we will be able to take advantage of PHP 5 features. That said, there are quite a few cool features in progress. Check out the latest 1.8 Roadmap here. If any of your "mission critical" issues have been bumped to the "postponed" section of the roadmap - please consider whether your organization is in a position to contribute engineering or financial resources to help make them happen sooner. We're super excited about the contributions being made by Marshall Newrock and Ideal Solutions - and look forward to other development shops and organizations stepping up to help get things done. The team is hard at work on 1.8 issues - 30 issues have already been completed! - and we're shooting to have another 10 knocked off from the open issues list by the end of this week. Michal Mach from our Poland team is working hard to take our QA efforts to the next level by designing and implementing a framework for Continuous Integration testing ("CI"). Once the framework is implemented - we will be able to automatically run comprehensive test suites. We will be posting more details on this important work soon. Michal also educated us as to the value of having offline documentation available for CiviCRM - so folks can distribute it via CD or other offline media, and it can be used in settings which have sporadic (or no) connectivity. Starting today - you can download all available documentation in either PDF or zipped HTML format from our SourcForge Downloads site. Thanks Michal!