CiviCRM 3.0 Stable is now available!

After more than 7 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 3.0 Stable. We think that 3.0 marks a major milestone for CiviCRM - with major usability and workflow improvements and a new cleaner "look and feel". You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our public demo site. Some of the exciting features in 3.0 include:

• Reporting - More than 20 reports are included in this release. You can customize these report instances AND create new instances with different filters and display columns from the Report Templates screens.
• Redesigned contact summary and contact edit screens - These screens have been completely redesigned to maximize readability. Tabs now display the number of records (e.g. contributions, events, etc.) - so you don't have to open a tab to see if the contact has any records of that type.
• Create contacts while recording contributions, memberships, event registrations and cases - Use the configurable "new contact" pop-up form to create a contact "inline" if a contact is not already in your database.
• Configurable drill-down menus - New navigation bar gives you one-click access to almost any screen or function. AND you can modify and rearrange the menus to suit your organizations needs. You can add links to commonly used profile forms, other related web applications...any web page.
• Improved Send Email screen - Includes support to CC and BCC, as well as improved layout.
• Context menu for contact actions - From any contact search results list, you can right-click a contact row with your mouse get a menu of actions such as "Record Contribution", "Register for Event" and more.
• Event Templates and streamlined event configuration screens - You can use event templates to simplify the process of creating similar events - store the common configuration settings in the template and then select it when you create a new event.
• A new unit testing framework and the first stages in building a comprehensive test suite which will significantly improve quality and stability of releases going forward.
• Powerful new hooks for integrators and developers who need to extend and customize existing features. Check out Lobo's blog for some detailed examples of customization via hooks.
• .... and 300+ additional improvements and bug fixes

You can find more detailed Release Highlights here.   A big round of applause is due to all the folks who downloaded, tested and submitted bug reports during the 3.0 release cycle. The alpha and beta packages were downloaded more than 2,000 times . Approximately 20% of installed sites reporting back their version to us are already using 3.0!. Several hundred bugs and "improvements" were reported by community members and fixed by the team during the release cycle. We'll be announcing the winners of our "bug finder" contest shortly!  

Download

You can download CiviCRM 3.0 at our download page. Select from the Newest Files section. The filenames include the 3.0 label: civicrm-3.0.0…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal / Joomla! / Standalone).  

New 3.0 Installations

If you are installing CiviCRM 3.0 from scratch, use the installation instructions linked below:

• Drupal Installation
• Joomla! Installation
• Standalone Installation

 

Upgrading to 3.0 Stable

If you are upgrading an existing 2.2 site (working with a copy of the site, of course) OR upgrading from an earlier version of 3.0 (alpha or beta releases), we have provided a browser-based database upgrade script. Instructions for upgrading are here:

• Drupal Upgrade
• Joomla! Upgrade
• Standalone Upgrade

 

Reporting Issues and Bugs

We look forward to getting your feedback on the release in the coming days. If you have questions about installing, upgrading and / or using 3.0 features - or you're seeing a problem and you're not sure if it's a bug - please post your issue to the applicable section of the Community Forum. Include as many specifics as possible about the issue or question. Bugs should be reported via our issue tracking system. Please select 3.0 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 by checking the open issues queue.

Comments

Way to go, Civi folks!

I checked lobo's blog but didn't see anything that seemed to address the question: are there significant changes to the public API functions in 3.0 vs. 2.2x? Some kind of very brief log of API functions that change between versions (names, arguments, structure of returned data) would be super helpful.

There were several changes to API's - notably in the Location APIs. However, we have added backwards compatible wrapper functions so if you're using 2.2x API's they should still work properly in 3.0. Let us know if you find any exceptions.