Development plans and proposals for CiviCRM v2.2

The CiviCRM team branched off v2.1 late last week. We hope to knock off most of the remaining v2.1 issues over the next few days and release the the first beta candidate. Please do help us out by downloading and testing the release OR testing it on our sandbox site. Your help does help make it a more solid and stable release. This also means that the core team can start working on CiviCRM v2.2. After a 6 week code freeze / QA / alpha cycle, the developer team is typically ready to go and start working on new things. The list of currently open issues for 2.2 can be found on our issue tracker. Please do add your suggestions and requests to the Feature Requests and Suggestions board. As with any open source projects, requests and suggestions with attached patches/sponsorships are more likely to make it into the release. Personally, I'm excited and have already fixed a couple of issues and made a few db changes for 2.2. The FishEye view of changes to the repository give you a good feel for what changes are being committed. We have two big consulting projects that will be part of 2.2, CiviCase and USPIRG Multi-org project. We expect these two projects to take up between 50-75% of development resources for v2.2. This limits the number of additional new features / enhancements to the core components, however it does allow us to make a fair amount of small-medium sized improvements and bug fixes across all the components. Some of the other features from the issue queue and the wiki page that are of interest to me include:

• Ability to add multiple values for a custom group - CRM-1527
• Ability to select records across multiple search screens for any action
• Incorporating the dojo grid widget in various CiviCRM selector. More ajax goodness across CiviCRM.
• Personal Campaign Pages
• Integration with some important Drupal modules specifically: Views, CCK and OG. I do hope the community steps up and bridges the gap here
• Better support and integration with Joomla 1.5. Its cool to see Roger and Elin contributing patches and components to Joomla.

Some of the longer term projects on my list which may not make it into v2.2 include:

• Audit trail capabilities for some core tables in the db. I've been reading a bit about this in the book Get It Done With MySQL 5&6 (chapter 21) and it does seem a fairly big undertaking
• Restructure the way we store custom data checkboxes and multi-select elements to make import, export and search more efficient. See this forum topic for more details. I suspect we'll do something similar to storing price set information when we restructure price sets
• Separate operations / permissions for "Move to Trash" vs. "Permanent Delete" for contact records. The default action is "Move to Trash". Users with "Permanent Delete" permission can periodically run an "Empty Trash" operation.
• Convince a group of people to step up and fund CiviVoter and CiviPhoneBank

Comments

FYI, I've just been hired to configure a Drupal 5 + CiviCRM 2.0 install to function as a phonebank. The main new component will simply be mass-creation of activities (assigning callees to callers), but perhaps this might serve as a foundation for your goals. FYI, it will be implemented entirely through the CiviCRM API and direct SQL queries as a Drupal module, since I'm not inclined to hack CiviCRM core.