Blogs

Following on from our training camps last summer, we are very pleased to announce another two training events in London this September/October. The first is aimed at users and administrators, and the second is aimed at integrators, implementors and developers.

We'll have folks from around CiviLand joining us for these trainings (Archduke Lobo, Grand High Wizard Dave Greenberg, and more) so you'll be learning from the experts.

Here we are with the third BETA release of version 3.2 - it is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember this is a BETA release and it should NOT be used on production sites, even though we're getting closer to stable.

Important message for translators: beta3 is a string freeze release - which means, you can safely start your 3.2 translation work - not too many new strings and/or string changes should show up to mess with your work. For more details, please refer to previous release announcement.

Now following with information about 3.2beta3: this release includes several major new features/highlights:

UPDATE: Dec 17, 2010

dharmatech has contributed a similar module to drupal.

d.o. page: http://drupal.org/project/civievent_discount

civi blog: http://civicrm.org/blogs/dharmatech/add-coupons-events-module

great job dharmatech!

Last Friday I we had a BeNeLux CiviCRM meetup in Vianen, with 21 attendants from all three countries (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg). Lobo was present too as he was in the neighborhood (Paris?) anyway.

It was a very inspiring sessions, that got off with a good introduction. We split up in different parallel sessions, where Lobo did a general introduction, Erik Brouwer did a session on localization and I discussed my showcase of synchronizing data between CiviCRM and an Oracle application at De Goede Woning.

Here we are with the second BETA release of version 3.2 - it is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember this is a BETA release and it should NOT be used on production sites, even though we're getting closer to stable.

With 3.2beta2 we're introducing our new translation maintenance process. It's time to announce something we called "soft string freeze" - we reviewed and checked for formal correctness the strings that are extracted for translation. Now, we are giving ourselves and our community one week, until beta3, to review our user interface and see if we need any improvements and fixes before formal string freeze. Just as a reminder, after formal string freeze, we'll do our best to avoid changing any strings in CiviCRM user interface - this way, we won't be stepping in our translators' ways and breaking ongoing translations. "Soft string freeze" means it's a last moment to take a look at your string bundles, see what has changed since 3.1, see if there is no quirks and annoyances to be fixed - and report any problems (ideally, with patches) to be fixed before formal string freeze.

By the way, since we are at translations, we merged 3.1 and 3.2 translations and thanks to this (and hard work of our translators), we have the first 100% translation - big kudos to Dutch translation team! And here are the most current stats for 3.2: Top translations: civicrm » civicrm-32

Thanks to the good folks at the Party of European Socialists that sponsored the feature, Tech To the People & CiviCrm have made easier to generate name badges and place cards for your events.

We are excited to announce that the first BETA release of version 3.2 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember this is a BETA release and it should NOT be used on production sites.

This release includes several major new features/highlights: Usability improvements - Better looking and more intuitive Contact Summary Page. The new "Actions" button provides 1-click access to most contact-related forms. New clean and consistent icons have been implemented to provide helpful visual cues. You can now get a configurable contact summary pop-up from search results by mousing over the contact icon on any row. We'll be blogging with more details on these usability features during the release cycle. Support for PHP 5.3 -This release supports PHP 5.3. CiviCase Phase 3 - Thanks to the Physicians Health Program folks for pushing CiviCase to the next level! You can check out the phase 3 enhancements here. CiviEvent workflow improvements - Streamlining the workflow for events, providing 1-click access to event related screens from the configuration panel, and generating event name badges. For more details check CRM-6230 and CRM-6294. Free-tagging, and Tags for Cases and Activities - You can add one or more free-tagging "taxonomies" - called Tagsets - for use with contacts, cases and / or activities. You can also specify which tags can be used for which types of records.

Join us for the first Montréal CiviCRM meetup, Thursday July 8th, 17-19h! There will be report backs from CiviCon, French translation status, talks about the new book, case studies. We hope to encourage informal group talks based on various interests (users, integrators, developers).

Meetup agenda:

Report back on the first CiviCon (which was in April 2010 in SF after DrupalCon) and book/translation/code sprint French translation status and recent changes to the translation system New CiviCRM book and plans to translate

While doing a deployment for a large organization, our good friends at Rayogram hit upon a pretty severe export scalability issue. The primary export was failing for approx 40K rows. They contacted us to see if we can figure out whats happening and why. They first assumed that the big issue was using a custom feature (merge same address / merge household address) and wanted us to look at it and potentially optimize and fix the issue. In general dealing with memory issues in PHP are not something i look forward to (it comes a close second to debugging core dumps in PHP). Basically you cannot afford to leak a lot of memory in every iteration. For the export, if you leak 10K for every iteration, u will need 400M for a 40K export not including any of the memory used before export was called. On my initial tracing of the code we were leaking between 15K of memory for every iteration. On my local labtop, i could process approx 5K contacts before running out of memory :( It took me some time to get my head around the code and figure out what the potential problems were. I first eliminated our good friend DB_DataObject (which has a tendency to store things in a static global variables). I also ensured that we were free'ing various objects as soon as possible. Spent a few hours on this and realized that i was not making any significant progress.

We will be live streaming the CiviCRM Toronto Meetup at June 15, 6:30-8:30pm EST.

To join us, go to

https://my.dimdim.com/rnao/

I'll be presenting on How to Plan a Successful CiviCRM Implementation. We're hoping that remote participants will be able to join in our discussions.