Let's give 4.3.alpha2 some love

I'm writing to ask you to download and test 4.3.alpha2 that came out earlier today (http://civicrm.org/blogs/yashodha/civicrm-43-alpha2-out), especially anything to do with money. If you don't have the time and / or resources and / or skills to create your own test installation, please try a Drupal, Joomla! or Wordpress version on the sandbox at http://sandbox.civicrm.org/.

CiviAccounts has changed a great deal of the code and database schema associated with financial stuff in CiviCRM in this 4.3 release. Our organizations, and the organizations we serve, need to be able to depend on the quality of our project especially with regard to how CiviCRM handles and records money. Please help ensure a quality version of CiviCRM by helping us thoroughly test the release and its upgrade code.

4.3.alpha1 was downloaded over 80 times in the last seven days. I'm hoping we'll see even more downloads this week. 

Thanks to Andrew Hunt, Brian Shaughnessy, Eileen McNaughton, Generic (no really, that's their login!), Hans Idink, Jamie McClellan, Jeff, John Derry, Karin Gerritsen, Keith Morgan, Paul Delbar, Pradeep Nayak, Richard, Sarah Gladstone, Wojtek Bogusz, and the Core Team 42 issues were filed in the last 7 days! These will help improve the quality of the coming release in many ways (42 to be exact). Lucky them, because they've been testing their favourite functionality so it can be fixed before stable.

Even greater thanks go to Eileen, Brian, Pradeep and the Core Team who have resolved 55 issues since 4.3 Alpha 1 came out.

If you're wondering how to test CiviAccounts, here are some easy general suggestions: Doing anything with money will exercise CiviAccounts.

Try out every sort of contribution, membership, and event participation scenario you can think of, with and without complex price sets, with and without recurring transactions, online and offline, with and without multiple participants, with and without premiums, etc.

Also, try editing transactions in various ways to change the prices, etc.

Then try using the Accounting Batch functionality to export the data. It should be able to be imported into QuickBooks as an .iif file, or into other accounting packages as a .csv file. I would be especially interested in hearing about any problems importing into QuickBooks or other accounting packages.

If you organization is larger, you might try doing a few data entry batches of Contributions and Memberships.

Please post questions, problems, and potential bugs in the 4.3 Testing forum at http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,79.0.html (thanks to Paul Delbar for moderating it).

Thanks everyone for helping make CiviCRM a great open source project!