Blog posts by Dave Greenberg

It’s been eleven years since I took a leap of faith and joined Donald Lobo on a journey to build a powerful set of integrated, free and open source tools for non-profits. I’ve had a career path full of pretty unusual twists and turns - ranging from turret lathe operator, and chef in a vegetarian cafe collective, to co-founder of a banking software company and social worker in a community mental health clinic (and I’ve left out a few other gigs).

With 4.6 stable out the door, work began in earnest on the next release at last month’s Colorado sprint. Both the core team and key community contributors arrived at the sprint with specific projects they wanted to work on for 4.7. Great progress was made at the sprint and several of these projects are set to become elements of the 4.7 release.

I’ve been spending a lot of time the past few weeks working with alpha versions of our upcoming 4.6 release, and I’m excited to share some of the cool new features and improvements. This release includes contributions of vision and code from a wide variety of end-users and implementers. The fact that our entire community reaps the benefits reminds me once again of the awesome power of open source collaboration.

Every software project is faced with the challenge of balancing the need to innovate and introduce new features, with the interest of many users in minimizing their maintenance costs and avoiding the risks that inevitably come with software upgrades. One way to meet this challenge is to provide a Long-term Support (LTS) release with an extended release cycle.

If your organization uses the CiviCase component, we strongly recommend that you do NOT upgrade your site to the 4.5.0 release. We have been alerted to a bug in the upgrade process which may adversely affect custom data, smart groups, and / or report data for existing case types. A fix for this will be included in the next release (4.5.1) which will be available in early October.

This is it ... the CiviCON SF 2014 sessions have been confirmed, and no doubts this is going to be the best CiviCON ever!

Whether you have never heard about CiviCRM, are a beginning or longtime user, are an implementor or a developer, there will be an abundance of content specifically tailored to your needs. Just read on if you just want to preview some of these sessions, or go here for the full schedule, sorted by day or track.

This year's CiviCon will host an awesome line up of sessions, a free discovery track for those still evaluating CiviCRM, user/adminstrator trainings, and software and documentation sprints. Whether you're already using or considering using CiviCRM, the conference is packed with the essential presentations, workshops and people that will help your organisation get the most from CiviCRM.

Now that the holidays are behind us, I wanted to share some of the exciting developments brewing in Civi-world for 2014.

Folks on the core team engaged with our partners recently in a spirited conversation about an updated mission statement for the project. We went through several iterations to come up with something broad enough to help with setting direction - but specific enough to be meaningful.  We'd love to get your comments and incorporate them into a final version ...

CiviDay 2014 meetups are happening in all the locations below on January 29th! Click the Details and Registration link for exact locations and start times.

Location (City, State, Country)