We are pleased to announce that CiviCRM 1.7 stable is now available for download.
CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, internationalised, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.
New to CiviCRM? Read more at http://civicrm.org/
CiviCRM v1.7 has been in beta for quite some time. We've had 1000+ downloads and hence a fair number of installs and upgrades. The rate of issues being filed has dropped significantly and we will push out a final release next week. As with other CiviCRM releases, we will periodically update the final release with critical bug fixes and security updates. We hope a longer beta period results in far fewer revisions.
There’s quite a lot of talk lately about using CiviCRM in multilingual setups. After doing some research, Jose A. Reyero of Development Seed came up with a very through blog post describing the issues faced while trying to run CiviCRM on a site that is supposed to switch its language on the fly.
CiviCRM is localised into several languages and used by non-English communities around the world. Before it could be localised, though, it had to be internationalised – i.e., it had to be modified to make the localisation possible. My first assignment when working on CiviCRM was to take the English-only application, internationalise it and localise it to Polish.
We are glad to announce that in reply to recent requests we are launching a new support and discussion tool for our great community of users - CiviCRM Forums:
http://forum.civicrm.org/
We encourage everyone to use the Forums for all support questions and discussion (except for technical developer topics), starting immediately.
CiviCRM seems to be growing at a fairly nice pace with a good adoption rate in the community. In the run up to the presidential elections, quite a few of the democratic grassroots political campaigns have used Drupal / CiviCRM as their organizing and fund-raising platform.
We made a few major changes to the v1.7 search interface for a big improvement in performance. The first change was to ot use a wildcard for the prefix. Thus when a user searches on NAME, we only search for 'NAME%', in older version we would search for '%NAME%'. This allows mysql to use the index on sort_name and is significantly faster than a full table scan. The second change involved not searching the 'email' table when doing a search on 'name'.
