Blogs

There will be an Asia Blogger Festival in HongKong during 6th~8th Nov. I propose a session about CiviCRM to introduce the NGO 2.0 concept and demostrate CiviCRM via in-depth case study. Unfortunately, it was accepted!! I would like to invite CiviCRM community to help us to make this session betrer. plz feel free to comment it. Thanks!! You can check their website and program at: http://www.blogfest.asia/ http://www.blogfest.asia/?page_id=3 The following is the abstract for this session:

Since our first meetup at 2009/08/15, we already met for 4 times and started to do case study by functions. And with many support from Dr. Lee of Dharma Drum University, Petra Lin of TechSoup Taiwan, Jimmy Huang of NETivism and Fu-Yuan Cheng(project coordinator), we are translating the CiviCRM Manual from FLOSS manuals. For more information about CiviCRM workshop Taipei, plz check: http://net2.netivism.tw/projects/civicrm-workshop(in Chinese)

The topic of how to properly greet and send mail to couples, such as "Jane and John Doe" has been discussed many times, such as at the blog post: http://civicrm.org/node/558. But the problem with the approach in the blog ( and included in CiviCRM 3.0 ) Is it requires information about someone's spouse in their contact record and marking half on the contacts "Do not mail" even though there are times when I DO want to communicate with just one spouse or the other for different events.

The team has released version 3.0.1 today. This release includes critical fixes for the CiviCRM dashboard and Organization / Household contact editing. We recommend that sites currently running v3.0.0 upgrade to this version as soon as possible, especially if you are experiencing issues on the dashboard. The release also includes several other minor fixes.

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.