Joomla! Day UK is scheduled for March 13 and 14, 2009 in Kent. The organizers would like to include one or more CiviCRM-related sessions, depending on interest and availability of presenters.

If you are interested in or planning on attending OR if you are interested in helping to organize / present at a CiviCRM or NGO / Non-profit session - please post back to the forum topic.

If there's a decent number of folks planning on attending - we can look at organizing an additional user group meetup in Kent either before or after the conference (and possibly get one of our core team members to Kent to join in the fun).

You can read about the Joomla! Day UK on their event site.

CiviMail is getting another major upgrade in 2.2. Some of the features coming in 2.2 include:

• PHP return channel solution. This feature should enable more folks to install and run CiviMail. This will obsolete our amavisd return channel solution. No perl or sys admin / root access expertise needed any more :)
• Adding CiviMail as an "action" to search results. This feature will allow folks to send a mailing to a "dynamic smart group" and alleviate the need to create multiple groups just for civimail purposes. Thus if you want to send a targeted mailing to all the folks in the 94135 zip code in your "we want more green trees" group, you enter the relevant search parameters (check the group and type the zip code), do the search and invoke the "Send Bulk Email" action. You can read more about this issue here
• Adding token hooks and ability to send "templatized" emails. This is described in more detail below

CiviCRM 2.1.2 release with bug fixes, as well as a fix for a critical security vulnerability is now available for download. CiviCRM 2.0.7 a maintainance release fixing critical security vulnerabilities is also available for download. The vulnerability addressed could allow a remote user with insufficient permissions to access CiviCRM functionality via the API and / or command line scripts.

Upgrading your existing CiviCRM 2.0 and 2.1 sites is strongly recommended. Upgrade instructions are available on the wiki for Drupal, Joomla and Standalone

Looking for an opportunity to network and share expertise with other folks in the non-profit technology eco-system? The Nonprofit Dev Summit takes place in Oakland, California next week - November 17-19. Depending on attendee interest, I'm prepared to facilitate several CiviCRM-related sessions - as well as a few training modules (intro, advanced and/or developer oriented). I'm also planning on sharing a first look at the upcoming CiviCase case management module. And... there are lots of cool-sounding session on topics ranging from cloud computing to security audits and hosting. You can browse the current list of proposed sessions on the Aspiration wiki.

"The 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit will be the second annual convening of people and organizations developing software tools, web applications and other technology to support social justice causes. Bringing together a diverse range of developers, technologists, managers, eRiders, integrators, users and other practitioners who self-identify under the umbrella of roles around “developing nonprofit software”, the 2008 DevSummit will provide an opportunity both to gather as a community and to take stock of the field, while building connections and capacity."

It would be great to have a solid group of CiviCRM community members at this summit - so check it out and join us if you can.

I'm happy to announce that we've finally gotten our act together and configured a complete public demo for the Joomla! version of CiviCRM 2.1. Joomla! users and integrators will finally be able to try out CiviCRM for Joomla! without going through the process of setting up their own site. We think this will be a good step forward in strengthening the Joomla! part of the CiviCRM community.

The front-end demo site includes links to test-drive public-facing features:

• online contribution page
• membership signup page
• event info and registration page

After more than 7 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 2.1 Stable. You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our public demo site.

2.1 features a number of exciting new features, including...

• Joomla! 1.5 and Drupal 6 compatibility (CiviCRM 2.1 is NOT compatible with Drupal 5.x or Joomla! 1.0.x)
• Production-ready "standalone" version of CiviCRM (with thanks to U.S. PIRG)
• Contribution Pledges (back-office and self-service)
• Multi-language / single site support (with thanks to Google Summer of Code and the Joomla! team)
• Nesting (hierarchy) for groups (with thanks to U.S. PIRG)
• Contribution, participant and membership export improvements (with thanks to American Friends Service Committee)
• CiviCRM Home / Dashboard customization (with thanks to Frontline Defenders)
• Several usabiilty improvements including basic and quick search improvements (with thanks to CivicActions), and elimination of the annoying page reloads when entering contributions, memberships, and event registrations.
• FCKEdit and TinyMCE rich text editors
• Early-bird (date-based) discounts for events
• Multi-participant event registration
• Dedupe design and scalability improvements
• New tools for developers to extend and customize CiviCRM - including form hooks, adding PHP to custom fields, REST support for selected APIs, DB-driven menus and more.
• .... and 200+ more smaller improvements and bug fixes

You can find Release Highlights here, and check out the resolved issues listing for details on the 570+ improvements and bug fixes.

A big round of applause is due to all the folks who downloaded, tested and submitted bug reports during the 2.1 release cycle. The alpha and beta packages were downloaded more than 4,000 times . 250+ bugs and "improvements" were reported by community members and fixed by the team during the release cycle.

A special shout-out goes to some of the "heroes" who made significant contributions through both design and testing of this release - Mark Burdett, Chris Burgess, Matt Chapman, Peter Davis, Father Shawn (Duncan), Xavier Dutoit, Tony Guzman, Dave Hansen-Lange, Eileen McNaughton, Wes Morgan, Chris Mott, Brian Shaughnessy, Cynthia Tarascio, Elin Waring. This is another huge increase improvement in community participation in bullet-proofing a release - and should help make this our highest quality release yet.

Good news folks, we have a few folks interested in CiviCamp. So CiviCamp is confirmed for Oct 13-14, 2008 in San Francisco. CiviCamp is immediately after BADCamp. If you have not yet registered for BADCamp, please do so now (before it gets full!). We plan on restricting CiviCamp to 10 attendees (for space reasons). If you are interested please contact us soon (send me mail lobo at yahoo dot com, or leave a comment). There will be 6 CiviCRM core developers at CiviCamp! (Kurund, Deepak, Piotr, Yashodha, Dave, Lobo)

Agenda and Goals

The agenda and plans for CiviCamp is maintained here. If you are attending CiviCamp, please edit the agenda and include your goals. We hope to accomplish and add a few cool features and improvements to CiviCRM during CiviCamp.

This is not a training event. We expect participants to have some combination of php5 / mysql5 / javascript / CiviCRM / Drupal / Joomla skills.

Fees

We will split up total costs incurred with the group participants. The costs are primarily to cover food and location rental (if any).

Please post a comment to this post if you are interested and your availability on those dates. Also thoughts on what you'd like to get done in this camp would be appreciated :)

Location

CiviCamp will be held at the Yahoo! San Francisco location (downtown?). We will inform attendees of the address and directions.

Do you use Drupal/CiviCRM or Joomla/CiviCRM to manage your donors? Do you think CiviCRM is a good fit for your donor management software needs? Show your appreciation for CiviCRM/Drupal/Joomla and open source software by taking part in the NTEN Donor Management Survey. We got a pretty good grade in the NTEN CRM Survey (read more about it at: CiviCRM comes out on top in NTEN Survey). The current version, v2.0 and the upcoming version v2.1 are significantly better than the version when the previous survey was done (v1.7)

PLEASE NOTE: NTEN does not consider CiviCRM donor management software (?!) so you will need to "write in" CiviCRM. Will be cool to come out with high grades as the write-in candidate :)

The below is the email NTEN sent out earlier today:

We are excited to announce that the initial Alpha release of 2.1 is now available for download, AND to try out on our sandbox site. We're really excited about all the cool new features and improvements. Check out Dave's last blog for some highlights... or the 2.1 Roadmap for a more complete listing.

We strongly encourage folks to download and test the alpha release and help improve the final product. Upgrading to 2.1 requires a simultaneous upgrade of Drupal to 6.3, and we need test-drivers who can help us iron out any bleeps or burps that we haven't discovered in our own testing. You can contribute significantly to the project by testing the upgrade process against a copy of your 2.0 data, as well as running your regular tasks on an upgraded site.

This camp is now confirmed. The dates are Oct 13th / 14th. Follow up blog post here

Following the lead from our friends at Ubercart with Ubercamp, we figured having CiviCamp might not be a bad idea. We suspect that doing it around BADCamp will give folks the opportunity who are traveling to combine two unconferences in one visit.

Proposed Dates

BADCamp is schedule for Oct 11/12, CiviCamp will be held on Oct 13/14.