Blog posts by Eileen

If you are as guppy-minded as I am then slow page loads can send you into a bit of a spin. While that little icon whirs I start to engage in some checking behaviour (facebook, email, IRC), which leaves me with enough to ponder that I go to grab a cup of tea. Coming back I wonder where I got to, click refresh and the cycle starts again.

As we near the end of 2015 we also near the end of the 4.4 LTS. This has been the second LTS release and it has been supported by the LTS team for a little over a year - meaning 4.4 has been supported for over 2 years in total. However, as announced previously the intention is for 4.6 to be the next LTS and we are now announcing that formal LTS support for 4.4 will stop at the end of the Jan 2016.

IATS has been a payment processor extension with CiviCRM for quite a while and has been actively developed & supported. If you are using the IATS extension you can say a quiet thank you to Alan, Karin & Stephen & stop reading.

We get a steady trickle of requests regarding changes to what receipts go out when someone signs up for a regular payment. We use an extension to help with this 'norecurreceipt'. The extension basically prevents the is_email_receipt from being set to ON on the civicrm_contribution_recur table - thus allowing the inital mail to go out but not the subsequent ones.

4.4.13 introduced a regression which could adversely affect some sites so we are putting out 4.4.14.

The issue is here and affects 'some IPNs'. We recommend that you upgrade to this version of 4.4 if you are on the LTS. There is very little change in this from 4.4.13 and, as with other LTS releases, no database change.

In general we try to keep the CiviCRM developer interface with CiviCRM as stable as possible. Ideally hooks, payment processor extensions and api calls should change as little as possible between releases.

In every release there are some improvements and additions. Generally the place to find out about these is the api change log - ie,

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/API+changes

One of the 'features' of CiviCRM that has been an ongoing source of contention among our customers has been what happens when expired memberships are renewed. The current behaviour is that the existing expired membership has it's end date extended and the start date is altered to reflect the start of the latest membership period. This is great for figuring out when someone first became a member way back when. But, it makes it very hard to see breaks in their membership.

Just a quick blog to let everyone know that barring any new security issues arising we expect 4.4.11 to go out on 17 Dec. At this stage the most notable fixes in it concern logging and processing IPNs for paypal express.

Should you wish to help with testing grab a copy from http://dist.civicrm.org/by-date/

(it will be in code freeze from 10 Dec)

The team is excited to announce the fifth stable release of the incredible CiviCRM 4.5 series. This release includes some important fixes, and is recommended for everyone using CiviCRM 4.5.

» Issues fixed in 4.5.4

It's a little over a year since we launched the 4.2 LTS with the intention being to ensure security patches until at least the end of last year. Those of us who have been involved in or used the 4.2 LTS  consider it to have been a  success, providing a secure and very reliable release of CiviCRM, therefore saving support time. But we've recently seen a lot of organizations upgrading to 4.4 and the LTS no longer has the critical mass of users and contributors to keep it healthy.