Announcing CiviCRM 1.8 Alpha

We are excited to announce that our 1.8 Alpha release is now available for download, as well as testing on our sandbox site. This release features finding and merging duplicate contacts (de-duping), event price sets, employer fields in profiles, improved admin control panel, RSS feeds for events, the ability to define multiple payment processors, and more; the CiviCRM 1.8 Roadmap describes all of the new features, while the resolved issues list sports the implementation details and lists fixed bugs. Many of the additions and changes in 1.8 were heavily driven by your feedback and requests, and we hope they solve many more of your CRM requirements. Download You can download CiviCRM 1.8 Alpha at our download page. The filenames include the 1.8 Alpha label: civicrm-1.8.alpha…. Be sure and select the correct version for your CMS (Drupal or Joomla) and for the version of PHP running on your server (PHP 4 or PHP 5). New Installations If you are installing CiviCRM 1.8 Alpha from scratch, you can use the manual installation instructions linked below (these are for CiviCRM 1.7, but shouldn’t change):

• Drupal Installation
• Joomla Installation

Upgrading from 1.7 If you are upgrading an existing 1.7 site (working with a copy of the site, of course), we have provided a database upgrade script. Instructions for upgrading are here (again, these are for CiviCRM 1.6-to-1.7 upgrade; the 1.7-to-1.8 upgrade script is named civicrm_upgradedb_v1.7_v1.8_41.mysql):

• Drupal Upgrade
• Joomla Upgrade

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 1.8 in the ‘Fix For’ 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 1.8. Sandbox We’ve setup a sandbox site with the current CiviCRM 1.8 Alpha codebase (updated over time as we fix the remaining open issues). Feel free to click around and explore all of the new features.