3.1 Beta 2 - Including the New Personal Dashboard!

The second BETA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites.

This release includes several COOL new features:

• Personal Dashboards - ** NEW in this beta release ** Each CiviCRM user can now configure their own dashboard (CiviCRM Home) to include summary data that's important to their work. Any available 'CiviReports' can be embedded in the dashboard in tabular or graphical format. Check out some examples on Kurund's recent blog post.
• Contact Subtypes - Extend (and / or rename) the built-in contact types and create custom fields specific to a subtype (e.g. Staff vs. Volunteer custom fields). Thanks to the folks at Alpha International for sponsoring this much-requested feature (learn more...).
• HTML Emails for Receipts, Event Confirmations and more - Templates for all system-generated emails are now stored in the database and editable by administrators. You can easily add styles, logos and more to your emails.
• HTML layout overhaul for online contribution pages - Phase 1 in efforts to make front-end CiviCRM pages much easier to style / modify via CSS (learn more...). Thanks to Kyle Jaster and the folks at rayogram.com..
• Usability improvements - Streamlined DATE input and list sorting widgets. Prevent users from losing work by alerting them if they try to navigate away from a form with unsaved changes.
• Support for Price Sets in Online Contribution Pages - Provides the flexibility to incorporate more complex contribution options (e.g. "Contribute $25 more to receive our monthly magazine.").
• Custom Data Groups Extensibility - Custom data groups can now be shared between multiple types of Activities, Events, Participant Roles etc.
• Access Control for Reports - Access control list (ACL) based permissioning is now applied to report data.

... and lots of other improvements. Check out the 3.1 Roadmap for a good overview. Or you can review a compete listing of new features, improvements and bug fixes on the issue tracker.

 

Step up and help out!

Beta releases are a great occasion to get involved in CiviCRM community. There are many ways you can help make this release better and bug free.

• Log in to the CiviCRM 3.1 public sandbox and try out your favourite features. If you find a problem, please report it on the appropriate forum board. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset.
• Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 3.1 - let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you've done this, play around with your favourite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 3.1 release testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers!
• If you're a developer and have PHP skills, we strongly encourage you to develop and attach a code patch AND a unit test along with any bug you report through our issue tracker. Ping us on IRC if you need help figuring out how to do this.

 

Download

You can download CiviCRM 3.1 Beta 2 from the "civicrm_latest" section. The filenames include the 3.1 Beta label: civicrm-3.1.beta…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal or Joomla) or Standalone.  

New Installations

If you are installing CiviCRM 3.1 Beta 2 from scratch, please use the 3.0 versions of the automated installer instructions (the installation process has not changed):

• Drupal
• Joomla
• Standalone

 

Upgrading 2.2.* or 3.0.* Sites to 3.1 Beta 2

An automated upgrade process is included in the beta release, and the procedure for upgrading to 3.1 beta 2 is the same as for upgrading to 3.0.x. You can upgrade directly from 2.2.x, 3.0.x, or earlier 3.1 releases (alpha or beta 1). Instructions:

• Drupal
• Joomla
• Standalone

 

Reporting Issues and Bugs

We look forward to getting your feedback on the release in the coming days. If you have questions installing, upgrading and / or using 3.1 features - or you're seeing a problem and you're not sure if it's a bug - please post your issue to the 3.1 release testing section of the community forums. Include as many specifics as possible about the issue or question. Bugs should be reported via our issue tracking system. Please select 3.1 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 by checking the open issues listing. We will continue to include automated upgrades for subsequent beta and stable releases of 3.1 - so you should be able to upgrade your test site easily over the course of the release cycle.

Comments

Dave & CiviCRM core team - thanks for the shoutout, and congratulations! this is a great release, with fantastic improvements that i can't wait to get out to our customers.

also, i'd just like to note that working with the core team has been a lot of fun and very rewarding - i look forward to taking the next steps in the overhaul of the html/css frontend, and will be posting some of the details for themers/html gurus out there who are interested in the changes. I did a brief demo at the last NYC CiviCRM Meetup and got a good response.

thanks again for all your great work!

This release is certainly an awesome one and thanks for all the effort you are putting into cleaning up the CSS/HTML code to make it easier to style the CiviCRM "front end".

I cannot wait until this comes out in a stable version so I can start using it on live sites.