Day 1: Technically, day 1 was a fabulous dinner hosted by CiviCRM at Herbsaint in the warehouse district of New Orleans. This is Susan Spicer's restaurant, and it was delicious -- they even made the vegetarian (me) a special-not-on-the-menu meal! We took this time to get to know each other and talk a bit about CiviCRM, what we liked/disliked, and the development community in general.
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Meeting folks who use and implement CiviCRM - face to face - is stimulating, challenging and just plain fun. I spent last week in New Orleans at our Boot Camp, at NTEN's NTC and at Penguin Day - and came home tired, a few pounds heavier (good eats in NOLA), and vowing to make these opportunities happen more often!
NTEN Affinity Group
Thanks to Judy Hallman's hard work and useful "pushing" - there were two specific CiviCRM events at NTC - an "Affinity Group" and a lunch "Discussion Table". The Affinity Group was well attended - especially given that it overlapped with NTEN's Day of Service and before many folks had arrived for the main conference. There was a good mix of folks from non-profits of various sizes and types, a few integrators and several folks who work for other eCRM platforms. However, none of the attendees were actual users - and the planned agenda was focussed on user sharing and Q & A. We did a quick re-boot and managed to give folks an overview of CiviCRM features.
Several people expressed doubts about using an open source solution for their organization (one person even using the phrase "deathly afraid"). They raised particular concerns about support ("who do I call when something goes wrong") and technical resources required for installation, configuration and maintenance. As options for paid support become more available, and the ecosystem of solution providers grows - these concerns should diminish. However, for many organizations a fully hosted (ASP) solution is the only realistic answer.
A highlight of the meeting was Greg Heller's "show and tell" of several CivicActions CiviCRM implementations. Seeing CiviCRM "in action" really helps folks understand some of the power of the platform and the advantages of tight integration with a CMS like Drupal. John Kenyon also spent a few minutes describing his training sessions for organizations using or preparing to use CiviCRM.
Thanx to Elin Waring, we had two of Joomla core developers, Rob and Louis, attend the CiviCRM training in New Orleans. We had a pretty diverse CiviCRM crowd attend the training and hence could not work as much as we'd like on improving the CiviCRM Joomla integration. However, I did spend some time with Rob and got a few ideas on how to improve and optimize our Joomla integration. Here are a few things we plan on doing in v2.1 to better support Joomla v1.5
For April 20th and 21st. The session is already sold out. However if there is more interest, we can schedule another training (in Sydney?) and/or get another developer to help with this training. Please contact us immediately if interested.
A minor typo in a php file managed to squeeze its way into the release (CRM/ACL/BAO/ACL.php, line 799 or so there is an extra 'x')
So we've released CiviCRM v2.0.1. We took the opportunity to fix a few other minor issues. We expect to do bug fix releases every other week for the next few months.
After more than 6 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 2.0 Stable. You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our demo sites.
2.0 features significant code and schema changes to improve performance and scalability - as well as a number of exciting new features. You can find Release Highlights here, and check out the resolved issues listing for details on the 450+ improvements and bug fixes.
A big round of applause is due to all the folks who downloaded, tested and submitted bug reports during the 2.0 release cycle. The alpha and beta packages were downloaded more than 3,200 times - and our new ping-back mechanism reported 450+ unique installations. 100+ bugs were reported by community members and fixed by the team during the release cycle. This is a huge increase and improvement in community participation in bullet-proofing a release - and should help make this a high quality release. However, given the complexity of the architecture and schema changes - we do anticipate that a few more issues will arise during the coming weeks. We plan on doing periodic bug fix releases every few weeks as needed.
A few folks from the core CiviCRM team (dave greenberg, kurund jalmi, michal mach, yashodha chaku and lobo) are having a CiviCRM team meeting in Nelson, NZ. Our current dates are for the meetup to happen between Apr 23rd to May 4th. We could potentially do a developer and/or end user training on the weekends apr 26/27 or may 3/4. Locations could be auckland/wellington/christchurch or if a lot of interest in AU, sydney/melbourne is a possibility.
Earlier today at approx 6:00 am NZT (yes, we are early birds), we released CiviCRM v2.0-beta4. At approx 9:00 am, I saw a post from aaron about some missing files in the release. I downloaded and verified what aaron said and realized we had messed up big time :(. Our release czar piotr was offline and not reachable.
The beta4 release was missing the DAO files. We've replaced the beta4 release with a new beta5 release.
The Beta 5 release of CiviCRM 2.0 is now available for download on SourceForge. As we noted in our blog, the 2.0 beta series has gotten really good community feedback and testing. However, we'd like to increase the number of downloads and installs for Beta 5. Check this out if you need convincing that downloading this beta is worth your time!. We currently have close to 300 sites that have tested a beta release. We'd like to see this number go past 400 before the final release.
If you've already installed 2.0 beta 1 or 2 or 3 - and have reported issues - please take the time to install beta 5 and verify that your issues have been resolved. There were no database changes from beta 3.
We hope that this will be the last beta before a final release next week. This is also the last opportunity for us to help you upgrade your 1.9 database. If we think your db has triggered a potential bug, we will ask you to mail us the database, fix the bug AND your database and mail it back to you :)
If you have some suggestions or comments on how we can improve CiviCRM usability, please post on our newly created forum topic: What part of CiviCRM are you having difficulty with right now?
