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As hinted previously, I’ve been working on dedupe improvements for CiviCRM 2.1. The first thing I wanted to handle is to move as much of the dedupe search from the PHP code to the database side.

I created a wiki page describing the plan; it would be great if any interested parties gave it a read and commented. Thanks!

CiviCRM is an open source constituent relationship management system used by NGOs and advocacy groups (like Amnesty International, Wikimedia Foundation or the Joomla!

CiviCRM is an open source constituent relationship management system used by NGOs and advocacy groups (like Amnesty International, Wikimedia Foundation or the Joomla! and Drupal projects) all over the world. Judging by the number of community-contributed and -maintained translations and civicrm.org statistics, CiviCRM installations exist in over twenty languages using various alphabets (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, Chinese).

Thanks to the wonderful people from Joomla! who took us under their Google Summer of Code umbrella and personal commitment from Wes Morgan, of Environment America (who will be mentoring on CiviCRM’s behalf), we’re very, very happy to announce that we have two student projects funded by Google this year!

We’re currently planning on various improvements to the duplicate contact finding (and merging) engine for CiviCRM 2.1. Among others, we plan to have a more responsive mechanism by caching the dedupe search results in a more effective way, add the ability to restrict deduping to a certain group, as well as move at least parts of the dedupe out of PHP and into MySQL (now that we require MySQL 5 anyway).

To side-step the issue of users switching our demo installation to non-English languages and as a proof-of-concept for a possible future CiviCRM feature, we’ve implemented a ‘dynamic’ language switching – after logging in, check the demo’s dashboard (i.e., the ‘CiviCRM Home’ page) and look for the ‘Choose Language’ box in the top right.

For several versions now, CiviCRM ships with version checking mechanism that pings our server from time to time (every time you visit the Administer CiviCRM page of your install, but not more often than once a day) and lets you know if there’s a new major stable version available for download. (This mechanism can be turned off by visiting Administer CiviCRM → Global Settings → Miscellaneous Settings.)

We’re happy to announce that CiviCRM 2 will be licensed under the freshly-released GNU Affero General Public License Version 3.