Blogs

Check out / register for these upcoming NYC civi-happenings.

Some great news to kick off 2011...

Each month, a project is chosen from the many thousands on SourceForge.net to be their Project of the Month (POM). This month's POM is ... drum roll please ... CiviCRM.

We just released CiviCRM 3.3.2 - it is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site. It is mainly a bug fix release - for full list of things that has been fixed/improved in 3.3.2, please take a look at our issue tracker.

We introduced a couple of new features from Make It Happen Campaigns.

CiviCRM comes with CKEditor as a default wysiwyg editor. One of the missing features has been ability to upload /browse existing files on the server using CKEditor. So after some investigation I figured out you can easily integrate IMCE drupal module for this purpose.

Here are the steps:

When the dust settled after releasing 3.3 stable, we started planning for next steps in testing area. As looking a little bit back is always good for planning, we've took a look at what we managed to achieve during 3.3 release cycle. In short, we increased the number of tests from 792 to 920 (so nice, round number of 128 new tests) and added quite a few new test suites. Most of the work was put towards webtests this time (as opposed to unit tests), and those check the funct

I figured you'd be as worked up about this as I have been - but rest easy friend-o, 'cause we've got some good medicine coming your way.

Rules integration, Multiple contact subtypes, Upsell / change membership type, Permissioning integration with Joomla 1.6 ACL, Personal Campaign Pages - offline contributions, Integrate CiviCampaign with CiviEngage, contributions, events and mailings, and a few holdovers from 3.3.

In some ways choosing Open Source software is like making a bet on humanity. We choose to believe that without contract or obligation individuals, organisations and businesses will work together to produce something that benefits all of us. With CiviCRM it feels like we've upped the odds to double or nothing because the organisations that use CiviCRM represent some of our noblest causes (and some that we may not agree with) but parting with funds from cash-strapped or deserving organisations to fund shared development is a lot harder than spending money out of a business account.

In my mind contributing back to Open Source projects that we benefit from and CiviCRM in particular is both a moral and a practical obligation. If we want it to be there for us we have to be there for it. For those of us who may have limited funds Make-it-Happen is a great way to make our bet on a scale that is appropriate to us or our organisation.

Going into 2011 community funding via Make-it-Happen and direct sponsorship is going to be the key driver behind the remaining 3.x releases. Release 3.4 and 4.0 are both expected early in the new year with 3.4 being the last release that will support drupal 6 and 4.0 supporting drupal 7. Obviously supporting two versions of drupal will put pressure on the CiviCRM core team and the duration of that double support will depend on the community.

However, right now it's the time for us to think about what initiatives we want to support into release 3.4. There are some ongoing and some new intiatives up for sponsorship.