Blog posts by bgm

Around July last year, I wrote a blog post about a few user interface changes that might go unnoticed to most (covering versions around 5.55 to 5.65). Here are a few more changes that have been introduced in versions 5.75 to 5.80.

CiviCRM 5.79, which will be released around November 7 2024, will include a slightly different experience for administrators who wish to install extensions. On the surface, it is a rather small change which will make CiviCRM easier to use though it may have a bigger impact for CiviCRM hosting providers and for extension developers.

Whenever a new CiviCRM version is released, the announcements tend to focus on new features, which lately have been mostly improvements to SearchKit, FormBuilder and Api4, the underlying tools that will help build new CiviCRM interfaces. While you can already use SearchKit/FormBuilder for custom listings and forms, out of the box, the improvements are not very visible.

Now that PHP 7.4 is "end of life", system administrators are strongly encouraged to adopt PHP 8.0. CiviCRM has supported PHP 8.0 for some time now, but adoption so far has been slow. Here are the stats as of today:

CiviSMTP is an email delivery service for CiviCRM that has been around since the very early days of CiviCRM. Even with CiviMail, making sure that emails land in the inbox, and not in the spam folder, can be a challenge. CiviSMTP made sure that their IPs had a good reputation, well configured, and good bounce management. At the time, they were the only service around that supported CiviCRM, and you could often meet their team at CiviCRM conferences in San Francisco, back in the day.

CiviCRM is available in over 25 languages, thanks for the many efforts of hundreds of translators around the world, but also from CiviCRM developers who have made sure that the texts in the software can be translated and adapted to differents regions.

Occasionally, a feature or a piece of text might not be in the correct language, usually because of a bug in how the code was written.

As part of the ongoing website upgrade, the CiviCRM extension directory has received a few upgrades. More precisely, we changed a few configurations and workflows on the page listing CiviCRM extensions and how new releases (extension updates) are regularly added to that directory.

As of CiviCRM 5.25, the minimum required PHP version is version 7.1, with PHP 7.3 being the recommended version. Since Drupal 6 does not support PHP 7.1 (except LTS vendors, such as myDropWizard), and since there are very few active CiviCRM sites on Drupal 6, we have decided to officially stop supporting Drupal 6.

Back in September 2019, we had announced a plan to upgrade the content management system (CMS) running the civicrm.org website, as well as plans to make civicrm.org available in many languages. Today I'm happy to announce that we have reached a major milestone: most of the static content, user logins, blogs and many CiviCRM forms are now being served from Drupal8.

As many of you know, the civicrm.org is both the main site for promoting CiviCRM, and also where we blog, list extensions, promote partners and contributors, list the events organized by the community, showcase case studies,