Blogues

When the dust settled after releasing 3.3 stable, we started planning for next steps in testing area. As looking a little bit back is always good for planning, we've took a look at what we managed to achieve during 3.3 release cycle. In short, we increased the number of tests from 792 to 920 (so nice, round number of 128 new tests) and added quite a few new test suites. Most of the work was put towards webtests this time (as opposed to unit tests), and those check the funct

I figured you'd be as worked up about this as I have been - but rest easy friend-o, 'cause we've got some good medicine coming your way.

Rules integration, Multiple contact subtypes, Upsell / change membership type, Permissioning integration with Joomla 1.6 ACL, Personal Campaign Pages - offline contributions, Integrate CiviCampaign with CiviEngage, contributions, events and mailings, and a few holdovers from 3.3.

In some ways choosing Open Source software is like making a bet on humanity. We choose to believe that without contract or obligation individuals, organisations and businesses will work together to produce something that benefits all of us. With CiviCRM it feels like we've upped the odds to double or nothing because the organisations that use CiviCRM represent some of our noblest causes (and some that we may not agree with) but parting with funds from cash-strapped or deserving organisations to fund shared development is a lot harder than spending money out of a business account.

In my mind contributing back to Open Source projects that we benefit from and CiviCRM in particular is both a moral and a practical obligation. If we want it to be there for us we have to be there for it. For those of us who may have limited funds Make-it-Happen is a great way to make our bet on a scale that is appropriate to us or our organisation.

Going into 2011 community funding via Make-it-Happen and direct sponsorship is going to be the key driver behind the remaining 3.x releases. Release 3.4 and 4.0 are both expected early in the new year with 3.4 being the last release that will support drupal 6 and 4.0 supporting drupal 7. Obviously supporting two versions of drupal will put pressure on the CiviCRM core team and the duration of that double support will depend on the community.

However, right now it's the time for us to think about what initiatives we want to support into release 3.4. There are some ongoing and some new intiatives up for sponsorship.

We just released CiviCRM 3.3.1 - it is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site. It is mainly a bug fix release - for full list of things that has been fixed/improved in 3.3.1, please take a look at our issue tracker.

De Goede Woning is the first Dutch housing corporation to start using CiviCRM, and they are in the middle of their implementation process, expecting to go live in March 2011. One of their main loves in CiviCRM is the functionality of CiviCase, which they will use quite extensively for the following processes:

A large organization using CiviCRM is planning to switch to using CiviMail for their broadcast email needs. This is great news for CiviMail and will take it to the next level in terms of feature set and functionality. As part of their migration, we are integrating a workflow engine into CiviMail. For this version, we will be using Drupal's rules module, thus making it Drupal specific. (if you are a joomla user and interested in sponsoring this for CiviCRM on Joomla, please contact us via email / IRC). For this project, we'll be focussed on extending the CiviMail schema to facilitate workflow. Sending a broadcast email will be split into three steps:

As hinted previously, CiviCRM 3.3 introduces a new feature, a low-level tracking of everything that happens with a given installation’s data: who does what exact change (and when).