The New York Meetup was a great success last night, as 33 people got a glimpse into upcoming releases, several case studies, and great open floor discussions. Dave Greenberg, core contributor, joined in via Skype video to provide insight into upcoming features and answering questions.
The day has come! We are excited to announce that our 3.0 ALPHA release is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it's an ALPHA release and it shouldn't be used on production sites.
This release introduces many new features, some of them really important, that's why we decided to start a new major number series in CiviCRM versioning. One of the most important new features is CiviReport, which is a completely new component for advanced reporting on your constituent data. Second significant change is a major user interface redesign with a goal of increasing usability. CiviEvent was also improved with waitlist functionality, pending status expirations, and an option for administrator approval for participants. A full list of changes, improvements and bug fixes in this release is available on the wiki and in the issue tracker.
We are finding that CiviCRM/accounts issues are becoming increasingly important for our clients, and Eileen's recent blogs and the discussion they are generating are a fantastic step towards helping find the best way for Civi to deal with financial transactions.
For example, I think it could be useful for Civi to ultimately develop functionality for maintaining simple bank accounts within CiviCRM, so that small organisations can maintain basic accounts without the headaches of integration with an external package.
This is my second blog on the topic of integrating with CiviCRM with an accounting system. Those of you who haven't just run screaming from the room or suddenly discovered an urgent need to polish the inside of your car exhaust, re-organise your tupperware or push needles into your eyes ... read on.
One of the areas that occasionally hits the forums is whether CiviCRM integrates with accounting systems. I've been giving a little thought to accounts integration lately and have now spent a bit of time poking around the Xero API and thinking about what I would do if I were to spent time trying to get CiviCRM talking to Xero. The content of this blog is mostly non-technical so if you can safely ignore the stuff about APIs if it doesn't mean anything to you.
Yes, first item of business - the official announcement of news that has been showing up here and there already. The upcoming release, that was previously referred to as 2.3 has been renamed to 3.0. :-) After long discussions we decided that the return of CiviReport, together with many other changes and improvements that have been introduced in this release deserve a major version number.
