Blogues

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'.

USPIRG has decided to work on CiviCRM as the Code for Change project this summer!. Should be a great value add to the CiviCRM community. Thanx to Wes Morgan and USPIRG for choosing CiviCRM. From their website:

Code for Change is an exciting new program which brings together computer science students and recent graduates in the summer to lead an open source software development project. The projects will vary from year to year, but they'll tend to focus on furthering the online organizing work of U.S. PIRG and, being open source, lots of other organizations as well.

This summer, we'll be working on the CivicSpace project to make it a world class online organizing platform. By the end of the summer, organizations working on issues ranging from preserving our last remaining wild forests to preventing human rights abuses will be able to take advantage of our work to get more and more people involved in their issues online.