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

Here is a tentative release schedule for v1.7. As in any software project, these dates are tentative and subject to delays. UPDATE: I've updated to our latest dates

We're pretty excited about the cool new features in the upcoming 1.6 release (now in Alpha) - and want to encourage folks to check out / play with these features on the Public Sandbox. So... open the sandbox in a separate window - then login (user = demo, password = demo) and try these out...

• The quick "Contact Search" block in the left column uses a suggestive search widget which finds contacts as you type in letters. Try typing in "ada" and see what happens.
• Site Administrators no longer have to struggle with editing civicrm.settings.php to set and modify site configuration. Most settings are now controlled from the Admin Control Panel » Global Settings section.

This installment of our architecture series will introduce the templating system used by CiviCRM as the presentation layer (e.g. to actually render forms and pages). Every CiviCRM screen is "composed" from one or more template files. These files contain a combination of HTML tags, text, variables and (often) some code to control presentation logic. CiviCRM uses an open-source templating engine called Smarty. If you are planning on examining, debugging and/or and modifying CiviCRM screens - you'll want to spend some time reviewing Smarty's online documentation.