Blog posts by totten

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September 21, 2016
By totten Filed under Architecture, Release announcements

CiviCRM 4.7.x has made significant progress towards supporting PHP 7, MySQL 5.7, and Ubuntu 16.04. I'm pleased to announce the availability of the release-candidate for v4.7.12.

These improvements were made possible with the collaborative efforts of several people and organizations, including Mark Burdett (EFF), Mattias Michaux, Seamus Lee (Australian Greens), the New York State Senate, and the CiviCRM core team (Jitendra Purohit and me).

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September 7, 2016
By totten Filed under Release announcements

December 2016: Looking for the 4.7.14 / 4.6.24 release annoucement? Here it is!

The latest release of CiviCRM 4.6 and 4.7 includes security fixes. We recommend upgrading to 4.7.11 or 4.6.21 to ensure the security of your site and data. The latest releases include 9 security fixes and improvements. A number of other non-security issues have also been fixed in the latest releases.

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Juli 19, 2016
By totten Filed under Architecture, Release announcements, Tips

To ensure that CiviCRM continues to work with standard, contemporary PHP hosting platforms, a future version may make a subtle change in hosting requirements. We expect this to be mostly seamless; however, we're looking for administrators responsible for sites running a recent CiviCRM (e.g. v4.7+) to spend a few minutes to help ensure a smooth transition.

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März 9, 2016
By totten Filed under API, Architecture, Extensions

Automated tests are important when collaborating with other developers in a large project. Even if you focus your attention on a small piece of the puzzle, your piece depends on other pieces, and others may depend on you. There will be inevitable occasions when a change in one causes an unexpected change or break in another. Automated tests form the first line of defense, providing timely feedback so that problems can be addressed while the material is mentally fresh.

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Januar 3, 2016
By totten Filed under Community, Tips
If you're working on a site with CiviCRM v4.6.5+ and rely on StackExchange, IRC, JIRA, or other community media for support, then you should consider making an anonymized site profile.  You can prepare one with a few clicks and paste it into any support requests.  This will provide a report of key technical details (such as the exact versions of CiviCRM, PHP, MySQL) which may assist others in diagnosing your problem.
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September 21, 2015
By totten Filed under Architecture

Civi v4.7 introduces some overhauls to the core CiviCRM development framework. Some of the planning discussions can be found in the forum, but now that it's merged and stablized a bit, I wanted to give a walk-through for other developers. A few highlights:

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Mai 6, 2015
By totten Filed under Architecture, Community

CiviCRM sits in the middle -- exchanging data with your CMS, payment processor, email service, SMS service, spreadsheets, ad nauseum.  CiviCRM is also extremely flexible -- supporting multiple CMSs, multiple payment processors, multiple email providers, multiple SMS providers, ad nauseum.  These are great power features, but they also come with a cost -- complexity.  The on-boarding process for a new organization requires evaluating and configuring a plethora of integration op

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März 5, 2015
By totten Filed under Release announcements

CiviCRM v4.5.7 was released on March 3, 2014. The release was generally valid and safe, but some fixes were incorrectly omitted from v4.5.7. We're releasing a correction, v4.5.8.

To download the latest version, see https://civicrm.org/download

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Januar 9, 2015
By totten Filed under CiviMail, Interface and design

If you've been following the CiviCRM blog, you probably noticed the reports from Google Summer of Code 2014: Siddhant Rajagopalan built a new CiviMail composition screen, and Aditya Nambiar built an A/B testing system.

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