After months of development we’re more than happy to announce the concurrent release of CiviCRM 3.4.0 and 4.0.0, the first stable CiviCRM 3.4 and 4.0 releases! Both versions are now available for download. You can also try it out on the public demos: Drupal 6 / Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.5 / Joomla 1.6 sites. We strongly recommend going through 3.4/4.0 highlights post, where you will find out what’s new and hot in this release. The newest CiviCRM versions are:
- 4.0.0 for Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6
- 3.4.0 for Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5
Important information for multilingual sites
As per this blog post from a month ago, some multilingual data was turned back into monolingual. You will be informed about this during the upgrade process, but do make sure you have a proper backup of your pre-upgrade database, as only the contents for the default language will be preserved.
New and improved CiviCRM API
CiviCRM 3.4 and 4.0 bring you a new and improved API 3, designed from scratch by non-core CiviCRM developers (i.e., people who actually use the API calls on a daily basis). Your existing code utilising API 2 calls should still work, but you’re more than encouraged to test and upgrade it to the new API 3 calls – API 3 is the one that will be developed in the future, while API 2 will only receive critical fixes.Step up and help out!
The moment of releasing CiviCRM 3.4 and 4.0 is a great occasion to get involved in CiviCRM community. There are many ways you can help make CiviCRM better.
- Log in to the one of the demos and try out your favourite features. If you find a problem, please report it on the appropriate forum board. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset.
- Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 3.4 or 4.0 – let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you’ve done this, play around with your favourite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 3.4 and 4.0 release testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers!
- If you’re a developer and have PHP skills, we strongly encourage you to develop and attach a code patch AND a unit test along with any bug you report through our issue tracker. Ping us on IRC if you need help figuring out how to do this.
What’s new?
Quick list of the most prominent new features and improvements in this release:
- Comprehensive change logging reports for Contact data and Contributions
- Ability to REVERT changes to contact data
- Improvements to extensions mechanism (ability to download extensions automatically)
- A new improved api
…and other features, sponsored through successful Make it Happen campaigns:
- Permissioning for Joomla! 1.6 (requires CiviCRM 4.0)
- Workflow (rules integration) for CiviMail (Drupal installs)
- Campaign Integration with other CiviCRM components
- Multi-Site and hierarchical groups support for CiviMail
- Add Prev/Next links to dedupe merge screen
- Membership ‘upsell’ – allowing membership type to be changed on renewal while maintaining continuity
- Credit offline and existing contributions to a personal campaign page
More details on the new features are in the What’s new in CiviCRM 3.4 / 4.0? post.
Downloads
You can download the release from SourceForge. The filenames include the 3.4.0 and 4.0.0 labels, e.g. civicrm-3.4.0-drupal.tar.gz or civicrm-4.0.0-joomla.zip. Make sure you’re downloading the correct version: for Drupal or Joomla. Again, remember that 4.0 works with Joomla 1.6 and Drupal 7, while 3.4 works with Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 6.
New Installations
If you are installing CiviCRM 3.4.0 or 4.0.0 from scratch, please use the corresponding automated installer instructions:
- Install CiviCRM 4.0 on Drupal 7
- Install CiviCRM 4.0 on Joomla 1.6
- Install CiviCRM 3.4 on Drupal 6
- Install CiviCRM 3.4 on Joomla 1.5
Upgrading to 3.4.0 or 4.0.0
The procedure for upgrading is described in following documents:
Comments
Congratulations! Looking forward to upgrade our 3.1.4 production site to 3.4.0. Except for a small change needed in two of the 3.2beta DB update templates (Foreign key problem, not an issue of this release), the betas confirmed that this will be an easy upgrade.
Thank you team!
Boris from Dox Gallery in Prague
This is probably a good time to remind people that the core team will be starting to focus on the next release and if you should think about supporting the features you want through the MIH initiatiave (have I mentioned how if everyone who has ever missed setting up a cron, or not noticed it breaking, or not re-instated it after an upgrade donated $20-$50 we could get this problem solved properly!).
Then again, apparently if every organisation that uses Civi donated $20 we'd probably have the schebang funded.