Blogs

Not a well known fact until now - during 3.0 release cycle, we've been working hard with DharmaTech to start regularly using unit tests for CiviCRM development and quality assurance. It's time to go out of the closet, since we're nearing the end of the first stage of this project - which was setting up everyone in the team with proper tools and migrating all the tests that we wrote before to our new framework.

So here's what we have right now:

After more than 7 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 3.0 Stable. We think that 3.0 marks a major milestone for CiviCRM - with major usability and workflow improvements and a new cleaner "look and feel". You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our public demo site. Some of the exciting features in 3.0 include: Reporting - More than 20 reports are included in this release. You can customize these report instances AND create new instances with different filters and display columns from the Report Templates screens. Redesigned contact summary and contact edit screens - These screens have been completely redesigned to maximize readability. Tabs now display the number of records (e.g. contributions, events, etc.) - so you don't have to open a tab to see if the contact has any records of that type. Create contacts while recording contributions, memberships, event registrations and cases - Use the configurable "new contact" pop-up form to create a contact "inline" if a contact is not already in your database. Configurable drill-down menus - New navigation bar gives you one-click access to almost any screen or function. AND you can modify and rearrange the menus to suit your organizations needs. You can add links to commonly used profile forms, other related web applications...any web page. Improved Send Email screen - Includes support to CC and BCC, as well as improved layout. Context menu for contact actions - From any contact search results list, you can right-click a contact row with your mouse get a menu of actions such as "Record Contribution", "Register for Event" and more. Event Templates and streamlined event configuration screens - You can use event templates to simplify the process of creating similar events - store the common configuration settings in the template and then select it when you create a new event. A new unit testing framework and the first stages in building a comprehensive test suite which will significantly improve quality and stability of releases going forward. Powerful new hooks for integrators and developers who need to extend and customize existing features. Check out Lobo's blog for some detailed examples of customization via hooks. .... and 300+ additional improvements and bug fixes You can find more detailed Release Highlights here.

CiviCRM 3.0.beta5 is out and available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites. The next release is 3.0 stable, so get set ready, and if you haven’t yet checked whether your favorite (old and new) CiviCRM features work the way you expect, it’s a very good time to do it.

We have branched SVN repository for v3.0 after CiviCRM v3.0 beta4 release. So people who are running v3.0 via subversion checkout, will have to switch to v3.0 branch. You can either do separate checkout for v3.0 branch svn checkout http://svn.civicrm.org/civicrm/branches/v3.0 v3.0 OR Switch existing svn copy to branch svn switch http://svn.civicrm.org/civicrm/branches/v3.0 We will also be adding v3.0 for translatio

Sorry for the short notice - but I just got a reminder that the deadline for submission of session suggestions for the 2010 NTC is this coming Monday (9/21). The conference is April 8-10 in Atlanta GA. Many of you have attended in the past - it's a pretty big deal at least for US non-profits. It's definitely a great opportunity for exposure and can be an awesome way to help promote CiviCRM as a project. I would encourage any of you who are interested in seeing CiviCRM related session(s) on the agenda to jump in a submit session suggestions (you can submit several): Submit session suggestions here In general, case study / success stories are well received ("Pump up your online fundraising with open source tools"). You do NOT need to volunteer to lead the session in order to suggest it (altho I suspect that helps) :-) Last years sessions that had some CiviCRM content included: Selecting and Implementing Open Source Constituent Relationship Management: Views from the Trenches with CiviCRM, MPower & SugarCRM Users. Not your Parent's Custom Application: Building Exactly What you Need on top of a Platform CRM Sewing Circle If you do submit sessions - let me know and we'll be sure to blog about them since the next step is a community voting process - and we can encourage folks in the community to vote for your sessions.

There was a thread in the forum a few weeks ago about adding generic replacements for tokens that dont have a value for a specific contact. An example is where the first name field is blank and the organization would want to substitute friend or member instead of keeping it blank. The token engine does not provide this functionality by default, however implementing it via a hook is relatively trivial.