The team is excited to announce that the first public ALPHA release of version 3.2 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember this is an ALPHA release and it should NOT be used on production sites.
Blogs
As of now (version 3.1.5), CiviCRM limits finding and merging of duplicate records to users with the "Administer CiviCRM" permission. A recent thread on the forums points out that some organizations will want to allow that privilege to non-administrative users. Having a need for this myself, I'm looking for the best way to do it. If a reasonable solution can be found, I'm hoping the changes will make it into core at some point in the future.
A while ago I mentioned that I was finding the backup and migrate module a better option to syncing Civi installs that the Civi drush command and Lobo asked if I would do a write-up on it.
I'm going to keep this pretty brief but I think it is worth telling people about as I find it really quick & easy.
http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate (AKA BAM)
The next phase of the CiviSchool project is collecting and maintaining all parent / student information online. This avoids the annual filling out forms work by the parents, and also the stuffing of envelopes by school staff during the summer and reentering all the information in the SIS when school starts.
At CiviCon SF 2010, we met the folks from Emotive LLC (chang and matthew b) who expressed an interest in helping scale CiviCRM and in specific help with building an import system that can handle large data sets.
I started discussing this with chang on the forums and IRC. You can read our forum thread here: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,13630.0.html
About 25 folks gathered at the Wikimedia Foundation offices last night for our May SF meetup. We had a good mix of new and experienced folks, representing both organizations and consultants.
The first Toronto CiviCRM Meetup held at the RNAO headquarters near King St and University Ave last night was a great success.
There were 29 registrants and about that many attended. (It seems like the small number of regrets and no-shows were canceled out by non-registered people showing up!)
The past few weeks have been just an amazing ride through the CiviCRM universe. We've had some excellent training sessions, an awesome CiviCon and then the sprints which produced a nice new book and some major improvements to our translation process. We've also been spending a lot of time thinking about what we want to accomplish with CiviCRM 4.0.