If you are one of the early adopters of CiviVolunteer on 4.4.x and planning to upgrade to 4.5, your help is needed to test out the 4.5 release of CiviVolunteer 1.3.
This release is to ensure that people are not held back from upgrading to the much anticipated 4.5 release. However the brand new release of CiviVolunteer 1.4 is right around the corner and will have significant new features. This release has been sponsored by the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a community cable access station, http://www.mnn.org/ , and will be incorporated into the Community Media Drupal Distribution which MNN is a co-steward of. http://cmdrupal.org/
If you run a volunteer program or simply participate in one, please head over to the CiviVolunteer Roadmap [http://is.gd/civivol] and give us your 2 cents on which features should be in the next phase of development. We are taking feedback via the forums and on the developer wiki. The list of unfunded enhancements is already a healthy length but we need your help to prioritize it! Let us know how you would use them in your program, or what combination of features are essential together.
We are adding more flexibility and convenience to public volunteer forms, making it easier to collect information about your volunteers, and adding a little polish here and there to the already slick scheduling interface.
A good volunteer program gives feedback and recognition to volunteers. So we are building a "commendation" system to allow managers to easily recognize exceptional volunteers. Different widgets will be available to display these commendations on Volunteer's profiles (requires CMS integration).
At the heart of CiviVolunteer is the scheduling interface. Designed for ease of use at the begining, we are now working on scaleability by adding filtering. It will now be easier to find contacts who are eligible for a selected role. You will also be able to search for volunteers without leaving the scheduling interface and apply filters for your search by qualifications or availability.
