Blogs

It was 6th August 2008, CiviCRM team was getting ready for first alpha release of version 2.1. You could feel the tension and sense the responsibility on everyone's face. Although it was an alpha release, each one wanted to close their outstanding issues / bugs. We were trying to get Open Issues count below 10 and wanted to close as much QA issues as possible.

Long time no blog – partly because I was traveling in the USA most of July, partly because we were busy finishing last CiviCRM 2.1 features.

For several years there has been interest in integrating a virtual call centre or distributed phone bank capacity into CiviCRM. Rob Thorne did a proof of concept back in March 2007 tha was used a bit by a political party (http://cvdemo.torenware.com/). There has been a resugence of interest in recent months and weeks, with over 2 dozen posts and 2300 page views on a single forum thread.

We are excited to announce that the initial Alpha release of 2.1 is now available for download, AND to try out on our sandbox site. We're really excited about all the cool new features and improvements. Check out Dave's last blog for some highlights... or the 2.1 Roadmap for a more complete listing.

We strongly encourage folks to download and test the alpha release and help improve the final product. Upgrading to 2.1 requires a simultaneous upgrade of Drupal to 6.3, and we need test-drivers who can help us iron out any bleeps or burps that we haven't discovered in our own testing. You can contribute significantly to the project by testing the upgrade process against a copy of your 2.0 data, as well as running your regular tasks on an upgraded site.

The American Friends Service Committee, where I work, needs to sync some information between our CMS (which isn’t Drupal or Joomla for various reasons) and CiviCRM. The vendor we’re working with is writing custom additions to the CMS to handle our needs, and part of that process is creating a PHP library to connect to the REST API of CiviCRM. When we asked, the vendor was very willing to open source that library.

We've been getting a few favorable reviews recently. Some of the ones that we've found are:

As my Google Summer of Code project went past its midterm evaluations, I’m happy to report that the core of the multilingualisation mechanism will be a part of the upcoming CiviCRM 2.1 release.

For CiviCRM 2.1, the multilingual support will be rather basic, but still quite usable. You’ll be able to add language switching to you CiviCRM install, and once you switch from one language to another, certain fields will be able to have different values.

Yesterday afternoon the CiviCRM UK usergroup got together for their first proper meeting in Bristol. It was a great chance to meet other users in the UK and be involved in interesting discussion about how we use - and want to use - CiviCRM. It was also nice to go to the dockside afterwards, catch the last of the sun, and watch hot air balloons flying over the city (though at that point, the discussion did move on from constituent relation management).