CiviCRM v1.8 update ...

Here in CiviCRM land we are hard at work making progress with v1.8. We are knocking off a fair number of issues from the issue queue on a weekly basis. You can check the current open issue list here and the v1.8 feature set here. At this point we have posted all the outstanding issues to the issue tracker. We will release a schedule for v1.8 in the next week or so. As a reminder, v1.8 does not have many new features, but a few important ones (de-dupe, civireport) and a host of improvements. We'd like this last version 1 release to be stable and long lived (supported till end of year). Both CiviReport and de-dupe are making excellent progress and we'll have blog entries on their status and capabilities in the near future. This will be the last release that supports PHP 4.x and MySQL 4.x Having an extended beta cycle for v1.7 has definitely paid off as we've gotten significantly fewer bug reports since the final release. A few minor bugs have been reported and fixed and we hope this trend continues into the future :). Earlier today, Jacob Singh from CivicActions LLC committed a fix to the Advanced Search / Dojo Widget bug. This fix alone deserves a new release of v1.7. I suspect we'll do a new release shortly. A tip of the hat to Jacob for taking care of this :) Our migration to support via the SMF forum has gone quite nicely. We've got most of the community posting questions and requests on the forum with quite a few lively discussions. Installation remains our number one issue which results in a fair amount of frustration. We definitely need to address this issue in a early v2 release. Ideas, thoughts, comments and suggestions are more than welcome. The forum posts have exceeded our mailing list traffic on a monthly basis, which is a good sign. It has also reduced the load on the development team by a fair amount (IMO). We'd like to encourage all community members to play a more active part on the forums and help out by responding to other members queries. Earlier this week, tguil posted a thermometer module for CiviContribute in Joomla. You cand check it out and download the code at conga3.com. You can see a snapshot of the config screen here. We'd love to hear your comments and thoughts on the module.