USPIRG and CiviCRM v2.2 ..

So the good folks at USPIRG our continuing their support of CiviCRM and are sponsoring quite a few cool features for CiviCRM v2.2. In case you were not aware, they also sponsored quite a few cool features for 2.1. I had a long conversation with our USPIRG contact, Wes Morgan, on the feature list for 2.2. The wiki page has all the details (we'll add more details and issues over a period of time), but here are a few highlights that i think the community would love and appreciate :)

• Integrating imap2soap.pl into the main code base. This software was community contributed and the core team did not have the skills/expertise/energy to support it. The past few releases we've done a bit of email integration work, and in v2.2 we'll convert imap2soap.pl to php and make it part of the core code base and officially support that version.
• Dynamic groups for mailings. Lets assume you have have a California group. With this feature, you will be able to send a mailing to all the contacts in the 94122 zipcode in the california group. This will avoid creating lots of smaller groups for the sole purpose of sending 1 or more mailings. We'll probably start this off via custom search and then implement the same interface for the built in search
• A few other improvements to CiviMail including a new hook for mailing tokens, more fine grained permissions for mailings, and a categorization scheme for groups and mailings (i.e. ability to maintain them in a folder like structure)
• The beginnings of a new import facility for CiviCRM. Import has been long overdue in need of an overhaul. We'll start off by building a flexible data input mechanism (sql or csv). Also the ability to group and tag each contact indivdually. We'll see if we can squeeze some significant performance gains while we are at it :)
• More improvements to the standalone version.

Overall i'm quite excited with these improvements to CiviCRM. A hat-tip to Wes Morgan for facilitating this and being such a great supporter :)