Blog posts by Dave Greenberg

With lots of excitement and anticipation on the mailing list regarding upcoming 1.7 features - the team has been pushing hard to keep on schedule for alpha release by the end of this month. As of this morning, we're down to 19 open issues out of a total of 80 posted for the release! We're shooting to get this down below 15 by weeks end.

There has definitely been some "scope creep" for 1.7 beyond the committed issues on the road-map. The good news is that these additions have been the result of community feedback and are responses to the real-world use cases that folks are bringing to the team. We're doing our best to balance responsiveness to these requests with the need to get releases out on a regular and timely basis.

Several CiviCRM folks will be attending two upcoming conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both conferences should provide great opportunities to learn, share and network with other folks in the non-profit and open source software communities.

Aspiration will be hosting the 2007 Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland next week (February 21-23). I am looking forward to lively conversations there regarding best practices and trends in FLOSS non-profit software development. Michal Mach from our Polish contingent is hoping to join us there and lead a session on Localisation approaches and challenges. We can also carve out time for an informal CiviCRM "users" gathering if there's interest.

The team is continuing to chip away at the big list of issues posted for 1.7 while we do our best at keeping some other balls in the air.

Activity on the mailing lists has picked up quite a bit over the past few weeks - with posts ranging from installation problems to "how do I..." to feedback on improvements and additions. Fortunately, Peter Hirst of Open Social Sites has done an incredible job chipping in and answering quite a few of the support questions. This has really helped the team stay focused on development efforts - major kudos to Peter!

We are also working hard on two consulting engagements - one for QuestBridge's 2007 Colllege Prep Scholarship program, and another for Selection Phase of The McConnell Foundation's Scholarship programs (in conjunction with CivicActions). Both of these projects give us the opportunity to improve the extensibility of CiviCRM for specific vertical markets/applications.

This past year was an exciting one for CiviCRM. We experienced an exponential increase in the number of downloads, and a strengthening and diversification of our active community members. International adoption and translation activity also increased - although we like to see more growth for this in 2007.

dojo is an open-source Javascript Toolkit which is designed to facilitate integration of advanced Ajax and DHTML features into web applications. CiviCRM has started incorporating Dojo widgets as of 1.6 - including:

... and we are planning on adding more features in 1.7 as we work on streamlining the user interface and creating more desk-top like work-flows.

The team is making excellent progress on the 1.7 release. We've got 19 issues resolved of the approximately 50 issues posted for this release - and the new CiviEvent component is starting to take shape.

We are targeting code-freeze / alpha release for the end of February, and there's still quite a lot to do. Hence, our plates are getting pretty full in terms of additions for 1.7. That said, if you have critical requirements or fixes that aren't already on the list, speak up! If you're able to pitch in with some code, and engineering resource and/or detailed specifications - that's a big plus.

I'm back in San Francisco after a fantastic couple of weeks exploring New Zealand (Aotearoa in Maori). We spent all our time on the South Island - as there were so many things we wanted to do there, and so we could visit with Lobo and his family in their new home in Nelson. (Check out Lobo's New Zealand blog for updates on their experiences in NZ).

Overall, we found the "kiwis" (New Zealanders) to be incredibly friendly, welcoming and helpful folks... very informal, passionate about their beautiful country, honest and playful. The South Island is incredibly diverse in terms of landscapes and eco-systems - and much of it is protected as parklands and wilderness.