Blog posts by Dave Greenberg

Almost every week on the forum someone posts a search / reporting question... How do I get a list of contacts whose records were added in the past month - along with the name of the person who added them? Is there a way to export total contribution amount for a given year by Household? I want to include all contributions from individuals that are household members. I can't export the name of each contact's current Employer. What's the solution? ... and although CiviCRM's built-in search components are pretty powerful - there's clearly lots of things they just don't do. AND, given how varied the organizations using CiviCRM are - these general search tools probably will never be able to handle everyones' needs.

The Beta 3 release of CiviCRM 2.0 is now available for download on SourceForge. As Lobo noted in his blog, the 2.0 beta series has gotten really good community feedback and testing. However, we'd like to increase the number of downloads and installs for Beta 3. Check this out if you need convincing that downloading this beta is worth your time! If you've already installed 2.0 beta 1 or 2 - and have reported issues - please take the time to install beta 3 and verify that your issues have been resolved. There were minor database changes in beta 3 - to fix a few bugs. You'll need to run the SQL statements listed here if you want to keep working with your beta 1 or 2 database (rather than installing a new DB / re-upgrading your 1.9 DB).

The team has been working hard to fix issues and bugs reported by the community - and a second beta release of CiviCRM 2.0 is now available for download on SourceForge. We strongly encourage folks to download and test the beta. If you have an existing CiviCRM install - please upgrade a test copy of your site. Your efforts are critical to help ensure a smooth transition and a quality final release. We especially need folks with existing Joomla installs to (re)test the upgrade process as we've fixed a number of issues there. If you've already installed the initial 2.0 beta distribution - and have reported issues - please take the time to install beta 2 and verify that your issues have been resolved. There were no database changes from beta 1 to beta 2 - so you can simply over-write the beta 1 codebase. I've included a listing of the 30 issues which were resolved between beta 1 and beta 2 below. You can see the current list of remaining open issues here.

We are excited to announce that our 2.0 Beta release is now available for download, AND to try out on our demo site. You can find Release Highlights here, and check out the resolved issues listing for details on the 330+ improvements and bug fixes.

2.0 has significant code and schema changes to improve performance and scalability. The upgrade process is now a multi-step web-based process. We would like to encourage folks to download and test the beta release and help improve the final product. You can contribute significantly to the project by testing the upgrade process against a copy of your 1.9 data, as well as running your regular tasks on an upgraded site.

 

Last week we got some feedback on the dynamic Contact Search feature - in the form of a bug report. The topic was "Autofill is too aggressive". The search box was being auto-filled based on the first few letters typed - and the auto-filling was often NOT helpful. It sometimes jumped ahead and completed the field with a different name then the one they were looking for.

Earlier this week I had an opportunity to meet with folks at the Glide Foundation in San Francisco. Glide "empowers San Francisco’s poor and disenfranchised to make meaningful changes in their lives to break the cycle of poverty and dependence" by providing an amazing range of programs from meals to housing, health services, employment training and more.

We hit our target date for code freeze and the team has been working through our regression testing cycle. We are re-testing all resolved issues from the 1.7, 1.8 and 1.9 queues to verify that no fixes / improvements got lost in the refactoring for 2.0. We've put up a PUBLIC SANDBOX running the latest 2.0 codebase. At this point it would be super useful if folks who have existing CiviCRM installs get on the sandbox and try running the commonly used features and function as they would do them on their own site. This should really help accelerate the process of flushing out edge case problems, etc. Login info and info about posting issues from 2.0 sandbox testing can be found on the sandbox home page. There are currently 11 open issues in the 2.0 queue - which we hope to get this down to below 5 by next week. The anticipated release milestones and dates are: Alpha release: 01/21/2008 (downloadable tarball and possibly an upgrade script for 1.9 -> 2.0 included) Beta release: 02/11/2008 Final release: 02/25/2008 If you're looking forward to features in the 2.0 release - the best thing you can do is help move the Quality Assurance process forward by testing stuff on the sandbox!

Based on the success of our first two camps - we're looking to schedule 3 to 4 camps throughout 2008. These camps will probably follow the same basic format. We'll limit attendance to a small group of folks from 1 to 3 different organizations (approx 3 - 9 participants) and do a combination of design and coding on specific projects of interest to the attendees.

Now that 1.9 stable is out - most of the team has been focusing heavily on the 2.0 queue. If you've been "following along" - you know that this release includes substantial changes to the core schema. We think these changes will simplify and streamline many of the most commonly used queries.

It's been very exciting and rewarding to see the growth of the CiviCRM user and developer base over the past year. Some recent indicators of the growth and vibrancy of the community include: Downloads - There have been over 40,000 downloads of CiviCRM from SourceForge since January of this year (averaging around 4,500 per month). Forum - The community forum was launched in April and already was 800+ members (5,330 posts as of today)