After what seems to be an incredibly long time, we released
CiviCRM v3.2 a few weeks ago to good reviews and not too many critical bug reports :). Now that is out of the way, we are starting to plan the
feature set for v3.3
We've been fortunate to get a grant from
Open Society Institute to help add some features important for
Human Right Organizations, specifically for
Front Line. We've been working with Front Line for a few years and this grant allows us to target their needs more effectively. Some of the features that are included in this grant are:
- Extending Address inheritance from Organization to an Individual (or from any contact to any other contact - TBD).
- Building Advanced Reports and Dashlets for Human Rights Organizations
- First version of Logging
We also have a small grant from two community member organizations (Jason from IMBA and Roland B) to improve the queries used during dedupe. You can read more about this on
Jason's blog post.
We suspect (and hope) that both Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6 will be released before v3.3. If so, this version will support the latest CMS. We will figure out backward compatibility issues when we are doing the port and see whether it is feasible.
Finally, we hope to raise enough money to help get
Campaigns, Canvassing and GOTV into core. Kiran recently blogged about the
current status of this project. There are quite a few more things we need to do before we can merge it with core. If you can help
support this project that would be great and highly appreciated.
We've got a very aggressive deadline for v3.3. We hope to have a final version out before the end of November. Our current feature list is on the
CiviCRM wiki. There are a couple of items on that list that are looking for sponsors and/or developers. If your organization would like to see some feature be part of the core, please contact us immediately. You should check our
consulting agreement and rates and our
preferred approach
Comments
Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 has been 2 years plus in development with many API changes. Migrating Civi may be straightforward (I have no idea) but sites may have many other dependencies which may not migrate as smoothly and quickly. In the event dual compatibility with Drupal 6 and 7 is not trivial, please consider the relative impacts of making Civi compatible with bleeding edge and relatively small install base vs the large install base of existing sites or new sites that will be Drupal 6, not Drupal 7.
I suspect our firm won't be building new sites (exclusively) in Drupal 7 for 3-6 months after Drupal 7's actual release. I'd be surprised to find out if that was an exception, rather than a rule.
I think exception. We are evaluating new projects for D7 on a case-by-case basis. I'm guessing that we'll start developing new sites on D7 within the next 30-60 days. After all, the largest Drupal site in the world is running D7.
CiviCRM offers many of the capabilities a number of non-profits I support need. However, they are consistently concerned about ease of site maintenance and administration, such as applying updates that Drupal 7 makes so much easier.
If CiviCRM worked on D7 with just one more feature (setting up Individuals as Drupal Users) I can get this going so much more easily
Cheers
I think a lot of people will start developing on Drupal 7 very quickly, but I'd definitely be concerned about the existing install base -- I'd imagine there will be many orgs who are willing to upgrade their Civi install but not their Drupal install because Drupal 7 is so radically different from Drupal 6. The upgrade costs, in terms of both troubleshooting and retraining staff, could be pretty high.
Most of my clients are not early adopters and have smaller budgets. These facts, plus the dependencies by many of them on other modules besides CiviCRM (custom modules and contributed) that may not have a prompt and stable D7 release, means the conversion from D6 to D7 will be slow. I'd guess a lag of several months behind the release of D7. Bugs, and regression bugs in particular, and the cost to troubleshoot and fix them, has made my clients wary of upgrades, not of Drupal core, but of contributed modules in general. Of course, we'll evaluate all of these situations on a case-by-case basis, but this is my prediction.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If your old clients are not ready to upgrade Drupal core, then don't upgrade CiviCRM core either. Your clientèle may be different, but none of our clients are interested in doing CiviCRM upgrades for each version released. They want to stick with something for 1-2 years, then do a site redesign, Drupal upgrade and CiviCRM upgrade all in one step.
we dont know the feasibility of having both a drupal 6 and 7 version. I think the main question is: how many hours / $$$ are developers and consulting firms willing to contribute to help maintain and update an older release
The last time this transition occured (5 -> 6),everyone wanted it, but no one was willing to do the work needed to enable this. So we would strongly recommend that folks consider contributing time / money to make this happen if its important to them
lobo
I have to agree with the developers who have posted so far indicating that migration to D7 for production sites will be slow. The D7 launch could be different, but it took many months after Drupal 6 was released for critical contributed modules (views, organic groups) to catch up and do a stable D6 release. If D7 is anything like that, then it is unlikely that I will recommend D7 to my clients for months.
When the D6 launch occurred, I definitely had clients who were "stuck" behind D5 and thus unable to take advantage of important new CiviCRM improvements. I understand it is a lot of work to maintain multiple versions, and I am sure you guys will make the right decision for your team. I am commenting just in case my perspective is valuable in making that decision.
If you look at the bulk of the critical modules, their creators have taken the D7 pledge to have versions available on D7 launch day. With D6, most of those modules did not come until much later. Given that none of the features specified in CiviCRM 3.3 is critical, I think that people can stay at 3.2 until they are ready to switch. Without this approach, no one can move to drupal 7 until everyone upgrades.