Last Call for East Coast Boot Camp in July AND Search Improvements

If you were thinking of participating in the proposed Philadelphia Boot Camp, tomorrow is your last day to let us know (by sending an email to me - dave at civicrm dot org). We are still a few folks short of the number we need to run the camp - so if we don't hear from you tomorrow - we'll have to cancel this session. We're still planning to hold another camp in the fall on the West Coast - details to follow - but feel free to drop me an email if you're interested in that session. Meanwhile - on the new development front, the 2.1 release is coming along nicely. As of today there are only 12 open issues in the queue, and an impressive 263 completed new features, improvements and fixes. The QA cycle for the release will be kicking off shortly - but things are looking pretty stable - and this is a good time for folks to start trying out some of the new features on the development sandbox. One heavily used feature that has gotten a "make-over" is the Basic Search screen (Find Contacts from the main menu). Based on a usability review and prototypes developed by Zoey Kroll of CivicActions - we've simplified and rearranged the "search criteria" form and the actions section. We've also made the default behavior on "name" searches more intuitive - eliminating the need for wild-cards and including email addresses in the search. Similar changes have been made to the Quick Search widget - AND exact matches on Quick Search now take you directly to that contact's summary screen. I've been using both of the modified search interfaces quite a bit and I'm finding them to be much more friendly and efficient. If you're someone who uses search a lot - and / or has had some concerns about these interfaces - check out the new behaviors on the sandbox and let us know how you like them. We're also looking at ways to make the more complex search forms a bit less unwieldy / more readable. Suggestions are most welcome :-)