CiviCRM Standalone has reached a significant milestone. We are now ready to make the November 5.80 release candidate “the RC” for a first official, stable release of the new Standalone in December.
It’s an exciting prospect, representing lots of work from across the community over the past couple of years. For me personally, getting to this stage has been a key focus of my work on CiviCRM this year.
What is CiviCRM Standalone?
Standalone is a release of CiviCRM that runs independent of any CMS. No Drupal, no Wordpress, no Backdrop, no Joomla. Pure CiviCRM, if you will. If you don’t need functionality from the CMS side, then Standalone gives you all the features of CiviCRM in a simpler and faster package.
And now it’s finished?
Well… no. But nor is CiviCRM generally. Anyone who’s worked with complex software like CiviCRM will know, it’s never finished...
But we’ve reached the point at which all of the key components of the Standalone release are in place, and all known system-critical bugs have been squished. From user testing so far, everything seems to be working nicely. And we now have automated test coverage in place comparable to the CMSes.
And that sets us up for an exciting couple of months.
November: a special Release Candidate
Standalone has been available as a “preview” for some time now — so Standalone release candidates have existed each month alongside the CMS versions. But until now the focus for Standalone has always been on the “bleeding edge” of new development, so these release candidates have not been used as such.
The intention now is for the November RC to be the first “real” RC for Standalone. This gives us a month to road test as much as possible everything that’s been done so far, and iron out any final bugs that can be found, so that hopefully come December we have a version that is ready to be released as “stable”.
For this to work best, we need all the help we can get with testing once the Release Candidate is out. From Wednesday, please try installing the Standalone 5.80 RC for yourself. Let us know what you find, and raise any issues on the ~Standalone Mattermost channel or as issues on Gitlab.
December: stable release
What does a stable release entail? Well, it is not, unfortunately, a guarantee that everything works perfectly.
In practice, the first stable release has implications for how future development and releases are managed. So, from 5.80 onwards:
- Upgrading to future releases will be supported.
- Any regressions in future releases (where something that used to work stops working) will be prioritised in the same way as they currently for the CMS releases, including with patch releases if appropriate.
- Breaking changes will be avoided at all costs (unlike during the “preview” phase, where we have moved fast and broken things). If something is going to be deprecated, it will go through an appropriate deprecation phase.
It is also your invitation to start using Standalone for real — in production deployments. I wouldn’t plan to migrate my biggest site on release day, but I will certainly be considering it for new and smaller sites.
So, can I do A/B/C with Standalone?
If A is Two-Factor Authentication, then, yes, Standalone now has native support ;)
Apart from that, if you can do it with one of the other versions of CiviCRM, you should be able to do it in Standalone. But to be sure will require more testing — so you’re encouraged to try it.
Get in touch on the ~Standalone Mattermost channel to let us know what you find.
Can we add X/Y/Z?
November is probably not the month to ask this. The focus for this month is on ensuring everything it currently does, it does as well as possible. (That doesn't mean you can't suggest more future improvements — but they may not be ready in time for Christmas.)
Who do we have to thank for getting us this far?
So many people from across the community have contributed to getting us this far… but I would like to give a shout out to Rich, Mathieu and Nic for the original idea to bring back Standalone (and lots and lots of work on the implementation since); Tim for his patient guidance through some of the guts of the CiviCRM container; all those who funded the Standalone Make-It-Happen; and lastly to Guillaume and Andy C for their brave and thorough road testing of very-far-from-stable versions in recent months.
