The team is excited to announce the first stable for CiviCRM 3.3.0 – it is now available for download. You can also try it out on the public Drupal demo or Joomla demo sites.
We strongly recommend going through 3.3 highlights post, where you will find out what’s new and hot in this release.
What's new?
Quick list of most prominent new features and improvements in this realease:
- First version of new CiviCampaign component, it includes initial support for Canvassing, Surveys and Petitions.
- Advanced search extended to show objects other than contacts (and object related actions) - including activities, contributions, etc.
- Serious dedupe performance improvements.
- First take on extension mechanism for CiviCRM, allowing creation and distribution of plugins (payment processors, custom search, custom report templates for now).
- New case and grant reports.
- Better "session" management support for CiviEvent.
- First version of database logging, so you will be able to see who changed what and when.
- Address sharing between any two contacts.
...and plenty more. Make sure you go through 3.3 highlights post to find out more about what's coming.
Step up and help out!
CiviCRM 3.3.0 release is a great occasion to get involved in CiviCRM community. There are many ways you can help make this release better and bug free.
- Log in to the CiviCRM 3.3 public demo and try out your favourite features. If you find a problem, please report it on the appropriate forum board. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset.
- Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 3.3 - let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you've done this, play around with your favourite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 3.3 release testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers!
- If you're a developer and have PHP skills, we strongly encourage you to develop and attach a code patch AND a unit test along with any bug you report through our issue tracker. Ping us on IRC if you need help figuring out how to do this.
Downloads
You can download the release from SourceForge - select from the civicrm-latest section. The filenames include the 3.3.0 label, e.g. civicrm-3.3.0-drupal.tar.gz. Make sure you're downloading correct version: for Drupal or Joomla.
New Installations
If you are installing CiviCRM 3.3.0 from scratch, please use the 3.0 versions of the automated installer instructions (the installation process has not changed):
Upgrading to 3.3.0
The procedure for upgrading to 3.3.0 is automated. You can upgrade directly from 2.2.x or later. Instructions:
We will continue to include automated upgrades for subsequent stable releases of 3.3 - so you should be able to upgrade your test site easily over the course of the release cycle.
Comments
What are your tips when upgrading from 3.3beta1? I have a site where I have tried out CiviCRM (to my liking, I might add!) and have some data there, which I'd prefer to keep (although not critical). Are there any database changes between beta1 and the stable release?
The process for upgrading from Beta to stable is the same as the normal upgrade process. I know if looks like a lot of steps but in essence it's pretty simple - backup, replace the codebase, run the upgrade script
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC32/Upgrade+Drupal+Sites+to+3.2
When sites are in development / not heavily used we normally upgrade every time a point release comes out so you might get quite used to the process :-)
Thanks for you answer. I'm not unfamiliar with upgrading, I was just curious to see if betas, might be different since they are not supported for production sites. I wouldn't have been surprised if upgrading from them was not supported. I'm happy it is! So I'll go ahead and upgrade ;-)
Upgrading every dot-release is probably a good idea. Is there a way to be notified except polling the blog? Have anyone thought about a "Update available check" in CiviCRM proper? Or even a "Update automatically" like Wordpress and a lot of other PHP-based applications have? I'm running joomla and use the joomla update manager, would that work with CiviCRM?
Address sharing between households and individuals?
I thought the new thing was
Address sharing between orgs and individuals.
3.3 allows any contact to share an address w/ any other contact (individual => individual, individual => organization, etc.). It does have some "special" cases built in:
* If an individual shares w/ an organization, it assumes and creates Employee <=> Employer relationship automatically.
* If an individual shares w/ a household, it automatically creates Member of Household relationship.