We've had Deepak and Manish from India and Michal from Poland visiting San Francisco. We've been thinking about the various things we need to accomplish for 2.0 and having a few design / schema meetings. We'll be blogging in detail about various sub-projects over the next few weeks.
Blogs
In the past few weeks a few events have occured that make us proud of CiviCRM and the community around it. It has also been a good learning experience for some of us. As a growing project, we are glad that to have such a open, supportive community around us.
CiviCRM 1.8 is coming along nicely and we are more or less on track regarding release schedule. We plan for another alpha release early next week.
Lots of exciting things happening around – as recently mentioned the Kabissa project is getting up on speed, in the same time we are also approaching the finish of another project that we internally called HRD, after Human Rights Defenders.
Kieran Lal recently mentioned on the civicrm-dev list that he was interested in integration with the SunLightLabs API integration. This has been on my list for some time and I decided to take a peek at the API and while doing so decided to take a quick hack at integrating the API in CiviCRM trunk.
We are excited to announce that our 1.8 Alpha release is now available for download, as well as testing on our sandbox site.
In addition to many new features in CiviCRM v1.8, we have worked on few improvements for CiviCRM Profile.
1. We have added functionality which allows people to create User Account in Drupal using CiviCRM profile. So this way, user can create customized User Registration pages without using default Drupal User Registration form.
For more details: CRM-1633
2. Another interesting feature for profile is Option to Generate Email Notifications when a profile is created or edited.
We started work on the Kabissa project in full swing early last week. This basically adds a few more enhanced features to managing contacts of an organization. You can find the full specs and description on our Kabissa - CiviCRM Project Specifications wiki page.
The new de-dupe functionality, introduced in CiviCRM 1.8, is configurable under Administer CiviCRM → Duplicate Contact Rules. This post describes the meaning of the fields and the way their contents impact the de-dupe search engine.
The first decision to make after going to Administer CiviCRM → Duplicate Contact Rules is which rule to edit. For CiviCRM 1.8 we decided to allow one rule per every contact type (individual, organization and household); in future versions this can be extended to arbitrary list of rules.