Today marks the second beta release of CiviCRM 4.4. Congratulations to the CiviCRM community of developers; many people worked tirelessly to make this happen. If you haven't yet pitched in to help test this new version of your CRM, now is a great time.

It's Time to Try it Out!

Excited to try the new features in this release? Please do! Great software requires great testers, and you can help. You don't need to be super technical, but your participation will make a huge difference.

Today marks the first beta release of CiviCRM 4.4. Congratulations to the CiviCRM community of developers; many people worked tirelessly to make this happen. If you haven't yet pitched in to help test this new version of your CRM, now is a great time.

It's Time to Try it Out!

Excited to try the new features in this release? Please do! Great software requires great testers, and you can help. You don't need to be super technical, but your participation will make a huge difference.

The third alpha release of CiviCRM 4.4 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.4 sandbox site!

We Need You to Try it Out!

Excited to try the new features in this release? Please do! Great software requires great testers, and you can help. You don't need to be super technical to participate in this way, but your participation will make a huge difference.

The second alpha release of CiviCRM 4.4 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.4 sandbox site!

We Need You to Try it Out!

Excited to try the new features in this release? Please do! Great software requires great testers, and you can help. You don't need to be super technical to participate in this way, but your participation will make a huge difference.

Announcing the 6th stable release of CiviCRM 4.3, containing small bug fixes and two minor security updates to make your CRM more stable and secure.

This is a security release. You should upgrade your site immediately. If you are unable to do so, read the following security bulletins for alternate instructions for securing your site:

SECURITY Fixes in 4.3.5:

We've been offering CiviCRM consulting and hosting on a per-client basis for some time now, and as we have grown, we have started to feel the need for greater automation and consistency in our hosting offerings and contracts. Koumbit is currently in the midst of developing a comprehensive hosted CiviCRM offering, with the support of a few courageous clients.

We launched the 1.7 alpha sandbox this weekend. The site is designed to allow community members and developers to explore the new features in the 1.7 release and help us identify bugs in the release prior to the Beta launch (current 1.7 release schedule). Pounding on the sandbox will help enormously in improving the quality of the beta and final releases - so if you're interested in using the new features in 1.7 and contributing to CiviCRM - this is a great way to help.

I recently cam across Givewell.net, a group that has recently stirred some activity in the non-profit blogosphere. For more information and details you should check out the Givewell blog. They ask non-profits some specific questions and expect specific answers. Being a non-profit and an open source organization, I figured it would be a good exercise for us to answer those questions. Note that like most of my other blog entries, this is a quick unplanned writing exercise ...

Good background reading for ACL's can be found in the Wikipedia entry Permissioning is quite important in CRM systems. CiviCRM used Drupal's permissioning system and stretched it a fair amount till v1.6. It had two major disadvantages: One, our joomla users do not have access to the permissioning model. Two, the Drupal model did not scale very well from a user interface perspective. This was primarily because it displayed all the permissions as a grid. If you had 300 roles and 300 smart groups, drupal displayed a table with 90,000 checkboxes. The browser would definitely not be happy with this chunk of HTML