We recently moved our downloads from our server in Poland to Sourceforge.net. The main reasons for this move was to make the download faster and reliable. A side benefit was saving bandwidth and hence costs. One of the unforeseen benefits of this move was we get pretty good download stats from the service and a few surprising results. You can see the stats here.
Some interesting things to note ..
Over the past few releases we've been having quite a few people use and exercise the api. We are getting to the stage where people want to use the api to integrate with other applications (e.g. integration with Thunderbird).
The team is making excellent progress on the 1.7 release. We've got 19 issues resolved of the approximately 50 issues posted for this release - and the new CiviEvent component is starting to take shape.
We are targeting code-freeze / alpha release for the end of February, and there's still quite a lot to do. Hence, our plates are getting pretty full in terms of additions for 1.7. That said, if you have critical requirements or fixes that aren't already on the list, speak up! If you're able to pitch in with some code, and engineering resource and/or detailed specifications - that's a big plus.
As we begin our 3rd year - the team took some time to lay out broad goals for 2007. These goals are intended to help us focus on things that will improve the platform, grow the community and sustain the project for the long term. So without further ado, here our the 2007 goals:
Documentation: Incorporate good detailed documentation in the form of tutorial / manual / podcast / screencast / online help as part of each release. Usability: Engage with UX experts to guide us in improving and simplifying the product. Incorporate usability design and testing as part of each releaseI'm back in San Francisco after a fantastic couple of weeks exploring New Zealand (Aotearoa in Maori). We spent all our time on the South Island - as there were so many things we wanted to do there, and so we could visit with Lobo and his family in their new home in Nelson. (Check out Lobo's New Zealand blog for updates on their experiences in NZ).
Overall, we found the "kiwis" (New Zealanders) to be incredibly friendly, welcoming and helpful folks... very informal, passionate about their beautiful country, honest and playful. The South Island is incredibly diverse in terms of landscapes and eco-systems - and much of it is protected as parklands and wilderness.
I just checked in a few changes that allows a CiviCRM install to use a memcached server if available. We use the php memcached integration to make this possible.
To use this feature you'll need to do the following
I've spent a fair amount of time in the past two weeks figuring out how we could optimize and improve CiviCRM. Its been an interesting few days and I suspect will become more interesting over the next few days as we start implementing a few things. All this is in preparation for doing a pretty major load test for the Branner project.
Two articles worth mentioning and thinking about, culled from the fairly informative N-TEN Connect
Evaluating a Community - by Seth Gottlieb. A pretty good read on factors to consider when choosing to adopt/integrate an open source project. CiviCRM does use a fair number of other open source projects and we use quite a few of the factors Seth describes when we choose a project. We also hope CiviCRM comes off in a positive light when folks out there are looking for a relationship management systemTrying to get our arms around how to load test CiviCRM and it is turning out to be a major issue with quite a few steps. This post is primarily for us to sort things out and make sure we are on the right path. So here are the specific steps and various programs we'll use to test things out:
