Blogs

We continued with work in team strategy, helping team members to learn / share the work strategy and approach towards a problem. In last 5-6 days we have resolved 25 issues, created 29 and closed 43 issues which is the indication of better QA towards v2.0.

You can also try it out on our sandbox site here

This release has significant code and schema changes to improve performance and scalability. The upgrade process is now a multi-step web based process. We would like to encourage folks to download and test the release and help improve the final product

You can view Release Highlights here

The resolved issues list sports the implementation details and lists fixed bugs. Sandbox We've setup a public sandbox. The sandbox is a great way to "try out" the new features while helping us test the release. We will update this over time as we fix the remaining open and new issues. Downloads You can download the release here. Select from the civicrm-latest section. The filenames include the 2.0 Alpha label: civicrm-2.0.alpha…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal or Joomla). As announced previously, 1.9 and all subsequent versions of CiviCRM require PHP 5.x and MySQL 5.x. PHP 4 is no longer supported. New Installations If you are installing CiviCRM 2.0 Alpha from scratch, please use the automated installater instructions linked below (these are for CiviCRM 1.9, but shouldn't change): Drupal and Joomla. Upgrading from 1.9 If you are upgrading an existing 1.9 site (working with a copy of the site, of course), we have provided a upgrade path. Please install the new code without modifying the database and access the url "q=civicrm/upgrade&reset=1". The upgrade has been tested for Drupal 5.x only. Support for Joomla will be released soon. Reporting Issues and Bugs We look forward to getting your feedback on the release in the coming days. Bugs should be reported via our issue tracking system. Please select 2.0 in the 'Affects Version' dropdown. You will need to register as a user – this ensures that we can follow-up with you on your bug reports if necessary. Please ensure that the bug you've found is not reported already; also, there still are some issues open against CiviCRM 2.0.

v2.0 has significant schema changes, and hence a simple sql script could no longer serve as our primary upgrade mechanism. We are introducing a new upgrade system in 2.0 which will run in a couple of steps and upgrade the user's database. It has been an interesting exercise to come up with the upgrade script. Here are a few things we learned as we went through the process.

The results of the first day of our Mumbai meetup were quite impressive. We successfully knocked out around 7-8 issues.

Day two started out with high energy levels. We divided the day into three sessions.

Most of the CiviCRM team is currently in Mumbai, India where we are having our first world wide developer meeting. :) We are missing Dave Greenberg who unfortunately had to cut short his trip to India. :( But he is present via the wiki, blog and issue queue prodding us along. :)

I had a great discussion with Michal Mach and Dave Greenberg of CiviCRM about the new case management features in CiviCRM. I had a look at them, and I felt they are a good start. But they need some help. Getting a free and open source software tool for small organizations to do case management has been something I'd hoped for for a while, and having written a case management tool or two, I have a soft spot in my heart for this problem. I volunteered to gather a small team together of folks who would help the CiviCRM team by coming up with some good use cases, and helping them figure out features that would be necessary for organizations to adopt CiviCRM to do case management. If you know some things about case management implementation in small organizations (this tool would, at this point, probably not work for large orgs with major case management needs) and are interested in helping out, please drop me an email.

You can contact Michelle at michelle at nosi dot net

For several versions now, CiviCRM ships with version checking mechanism that pings our server from time to time (every time you visit the Administer CiviCRM page of your install, but not more often than once a day) and lets you know if there’s a new major stable version available for download. (This mechanism can be turned off by visiting Administer CiviCRM → Global Settings → Miscellaneous Settings.)

We have delayed CiviCRM v2.0 code freeze (and hence alpha/beta/final) dates. This was primarily because of other commitments, specifically developer boot camps and our combined travel schedules. We expect to have the code freeze in the second week of January (01/07/2008) to be followed by alpha, beta and final releases spaced out over the next six weeks.