Blog posts by lobo

You can also try it out on our sandbox site here

This release has significant code and schema changes to improve performance and scalability. The upgrade process is now a multi-step web based process. We would like to encourage folks to download and test the release and help improve the final product

You can view Release Highlights here

The resolved issues list sports the implementation details and lists fixed bugs. Sandbox We've setup a public sandbox. The sandbox is a great way to "try out" the new features while helping us test the release. We will update this over time as we fix the remaining open and new issues. Downloads You can download the release here. Select from the civicrm-latest section. The filenames include the 2.0 Alpha label: civicrm-2.0.alpha…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal or Joomla). As announced previously, 1.9 and all subsequent versions of CiviCRM require PHP 5.x and MySQL 5.x. PHP 4 is no longer supported. New Installations If you are installing CiviCRM 2.0 Alpha from scratch, please use the automated installater instructions linked below (these are for CiviCRM 1.9, but shouldn't change): Drupal and Joomla. Upgrading from 1.9 If you are upgrading an existing 1.9 site (working with a copy of the site, of course), we have provided a upgrade path. Please install the new code without modifying the database and access the url "q=civicrm/upgrade&reset=1". The upgrade has been tested for Drupal 5.x only. Support for Joomla will be released soon. Reporting Issues and Bugs We look forward to getting your feedback on the release in the coming days. Bugs should be reported via our issue tracking system. Please select 2.0 in the 'Affects Version' dropdown. You will need to register as a user – this ensures that we can follow-up with you on your bug reports if necessary. Please ensure that the bug you've found is not reported already; also, there still are some issues open against CiviCRM 2.0.

v2.0 has significant schema changes, and hence a simple sql script could no longer serve as our primary upgrade mechanism. We are introducing a new upgrade system in 2.0 which will run in a couple of steps and upgrade the user's database. It has been an interesting exercise to come up with the upgrade script. Here are a few things we learned as we went through the process.

Most of the CiviCRM team is currently in Mumbai, India where we are having our first world wide developer meeting. :) We are missing Dave Greenberg who unfortunately had to cut short his trip to India. :( But he is present via the wiki, blog and issue queue prodding us along. :)

I had a great discussion with Michal Mach and Dave Greenberg of CiviCRM about the new case management features in CiviCRM. I had a look at them, and I felt they are a good start. But they need some help. Getting a free and open source software tool for small organizations to do case management has been something I'd hoped for for a while, and having written a case management tool or two, I have a soft spot in my heart for this problem. I volunteered to gather a small team together of folks who would help the CiviCRM team by coming up with some good use cases, and helping them figure out features that would be necessary for organizations to adopt CiviCRM to do case management. If you know some things about case management implementation in small organizations (this tool would, at this point, probably not work for large orgs with major case management needs) and are interested in helping out, please drop me an email.

You can contact Michelle at michelle at nosi dot net

We have delayed CiviCRM v2.0 code freeze (and hence alpha/beta/final) dates. This was primarily because of other commitments, specifically developer boot camps and our combined travel schedules. We expect to have the code freeze in the second week of January (01/07/2008) to be followed by alpha, beta and final releases spaced out over the next six weeks.

A few of the NY based CiviCRM folks gathered together near Union Square in NY. We lucked into a pretty good meeting spot, thanx to fellow CiviCRM'er Chris P. We had 10 people participate in this meetup. This included a couple of folks who were in the investigative stages regarding CiviCRM. The agenda and some of the highlights include:

This is an old report, Check the latest report here:CiviCRM gets a solid A in the 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey Report (we did even better this time around!)

We just concluded our second boot camp in San Francisco earlier today. Running a boot camp is a bit harder than it seems. We'd like to thank the good folks from Chicago Techonology Cooperative (Tom, Brandon), Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) (Blake, Patricia) and USPIRG/FFPIR (Wes) for attending and being willing and gracious bootcamp participants

Kurund and Lobo will be in New York City on Dec 19th / 20th. We will tailor the session based on the needs of the folks who sign up :)

If you are interested please send me an email (lobo at yahoo dot com) along with ideas on what you'd like the session to be about. We'd love to get some user feedback, comments and critique of CiviCRM. We'll spend some time explaining a few things coming in CiviCRM v2.0

We will be hosting the meetup on Dec 19th at 9:00 am - 11:00 am at:

CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing) 123 4th Ave, 2nd FL New York, NY 10003 212-677-8621

We conducted our first ever developer bootcamp for a group of developers from TechSoup. The bootcamp was spread over two days and four sessions. Each session was approx three hours long. Overall we felt the bootcamp was a success. We also ended up with a couple of new features for CiviCRM v2.0.