Hi

I'm writing to ask you to download and test 4.3.alpha2 that came out earlier today (http://civicrm.org/blogs/yashodha/civicrm-43-alpha2-out), especially anything to do with money. If you don't have the time and / or resources and / or skills to create your own test installation, please try a Drupal, Joomla! or Wordpress version on the sandbox at http://sandbox.civicrm.org/.

CiviAccounts has changed a great deal of the code and database schema associated with financial stuff in CiviCRM in this 4.3 release. Our organizations, and the organizations we serve, need to be able to depend on the quality of our project especially with regard to how CiviCRM handles and records money. Please help ensure a quality version of CiviCRM by helping us thoroughly test the release and its upgrade code.

4.3.alpha1 was downloaded over 80 times in the last seven days. I'm hoping we'll see even more downloads this week. 

Thanks to Andrew Hunt, Brian Shaughnessy, Eileen McNaughton, Generic (no really, that's their login!), Hans Idink, Jamie McClellan, Jeff, John Derry, Karin Gerritsen, Keith Morgan, Paul Delbar, Pradeep Nayak, Richard, Sarah Gladstone, Wojtek Bogusz, and the Core Team 42 issues were filed in the last 7 days! These will help improve the quality of the coming release in many ways (42 to be exact). Lucky them, because they've been testing their favourite functionality so it can be fixed before stable.

Even greater thanks go to Eileen, Brian, Pradeep and the Core Team who have resolved 55 issues since 4.3 Alpha 1 came out.

If you're wondering how to test CiviAccounts, here are some easy general suggestions: Doing anything with money will exercise CiviAccounts.

Try out every sort of contribution, membership, and event participation scenario you can think of, with and without complex price sets, with and without recurring transactions, online and offline, with and without multiple participants, with and without premiums, etc.

Also, try editing transactions in various ways to change the prices, etc.

Then try using the Accounting Batch functionality to export the data. It should be able to be imported into QuickBooks as an .iif file, or into other accounting packages as a .csv file. I would be especially interested in hearing about any problems importing into QuickBooks or other accounting packages.

If you organization is larger, you might try doing a few data entry batches of Contributions and Memberships.

Please post questions, problems, and potential bugs in the 4.3 Testing forum at http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,79.0.html (thanks to Paul Delbar for moderating it).

Thanks everyone for helping make CiviCRM a great open source project!

CHASE is an annual conference/exhibition for charities and associations... http://www.conferencehouse.co.uk/CHASE/chase_home.aspx  ...organised in London and has been running for some years now.

I was invited to participate in a round-table discussion on CRM based on SaaS (ie 'cloud computing') technology to represent CiviCRM at this event, and I thought it would be good to establish an exhibition stand to represent CiviCRM at this event.  I invited other London-based CiviCRM service providers to collaborate on this event and five of us agreed to share the costs of the stand -

• Jamie Norvick of Compucorp
• Dave Melkman of Manta Ray Media
• Michael McAndrew of Third Sector Design
• Parvez Saleh of Veda Consulting
• and myself, Mark Tompsett of QualityTime Services

I should also acknowledge that CiviCRM user Seamless Relocation sponsored our stand by lending us the display boards and the furniture that we used, eg the tables and chairs.

Although the stand was only 6 sq m (3m wide x 2m deep) I have to say that we were fortunate to get a stand in a prominent position, but I don't know how much this helped in attracting the impressive number of visitors that we had during the two days of the event.

One of the most common phone calls we receive at Bay Area Children's Theatre is "Are tickets still available for performance xyz?" That call is especially common on show days, when most of our staff is at the performance venue and not in the office to answer the phone.

BACT already uses Asterisk to provide our virtual PBX and I wanted to see if there was a way to automatically give callers a list of sold-out performances based on CiviCRM event data.  I discovered an Asterisk AGI script called GoogleTTS that uses Google's text-to-speach API to read arbitrary text to callers:

http://zaf.github.com/asterisk-googletts/

The only thing that was left was to come up with a little php to get the list of sold-out events from CiviCRM and pass it to GoogleTTS to read it to callers.  The php is pretty straightforward -- it uses the CiviCRM API to fetch the list of events with start_date > today.  Two small complications though.  1) I wanted to include the location of the performance, and there's currently no way to get an event location via the API, so I had to use direct calls to BAO functions for that.  2) The API also provides no way to get the true participant count for an event that accounts for price set participant multipliers, so I had to use direct BAO function calls for that too.  Here's the PHP code:


require_once '/home/.................../civicrm.settings.php';
require_once 'CRM/Core/Config.php';
require_once('CRM/Core/BAO/Location.php');
require_once('CRM/Event/BAO/Event.php');

$config = CRM_Core_Config::singleton( );

# get set of all events with start_date > now

$events = civicrm_api('Event', 'Get', array('filters' => array('start_date_low' => date('Ymd')), 'event_type_id' => 5, 'options' => array('limit' => 200), 'version' => 3));

$soldoutshows = array();

foreach ($events['values'] as $ekey => $event) {

# find sold-out events
$soldseats = CRM_Event_BAO_Event::eventTotalSeats($ekey);
if ($soldseats >= $event['max_participants']) {

# look up city name
$locparams = array('entity_table' => 'civicrm_event',
'entity_id' => $event['id']);
$location = CRM_Core_BAO_Location::getValues($locparams);
$stime = strtotime($event['start_date']);
$newshow = $location['address'][1]['city'] . ': ' . date('l F j g', $stime);
if (date('i', $stime) != "00") {
$newshow .= date(':i', $stime);
}
if (date('a', $stime) == "am") {
$newshow .= " ay-em";
}
else {
$newshow .= " pee-em";
}
$soldoutshows[] = $newshow;
}
}

$saystring = 'SET VARIABLE MYSHOWS "';

if (empty($soldoutshows)) {
$saystring .= "Tickets are available for all upcoming performances.";
}
else {
$saystring .= "The following upcoming performances are sold out, ";
foreach ($soldoutshows as $skey => $show) {
$saystring .= $show . ", ";
}
}

$saystring .= '"';
print $saystring;

$text = '';
$in = fopen('php://stdin', 'r');
while(!feof($in)){
$text = $text . fgets($in, 4096);
}

And here's how we call it from our Asterisk dialplan:
exten => 1,2,agi(events.php)
exten => 1,3,agi(googletts.agi, "${MYSHOWS}", en,,1)


The first line calls the "events.php" code above, which sets an Asterisk variable called $MYSHOWS with the text that needs to be read to the caller. The second line calls the "googletts.agi" which accesses the Google API to covert the text to speech and read it to the caller.

The team is excited to announce the eighth release of 4.2 stable with support for Drupal 7, Joomla 2.5 and WordPress 3.3.

We strongly recommend that all sites upgrade their CiviCRM code to this release if you are using previous version of 4.2. There have been significant (40+) bug fixes since the last stable release of 4.2. You can download the release from SourceForge, and you can also test drive the release on each platform using the public demos:

• CiviCRM 4.2 on Drupal 7
• CiviCRM 4.2 on Joomla 2.5
• CiviCRM 4.2 on Wordpress 3.3

What is new in 4.2?

Here's a quick list of some of the other cool new features and improvements in this release:

• Extensions functionality
• Inline (quick) editing of contact fields (email, phone, communications preferences, custom fields) from Contact Summary - CRM-9908
• Recurring contributions and auto-renew memberships: allow self-service and back-office update and cancellation - CRM-10076
• Offer donors a choice of payment processors on your online contribution pages - CRM-9850
• Support for SMS blasts and interactions - CRM-9782
• Relative date filters on all search forms (e.g. "last month", "this year-to-date") - CRM-9427
• Improve search filters for mailings and link to advanced search from mailing summaries - CRM-9542
• Batch (automated) dedupe and merge - CRM-9312
• Create and send thank-you letters from contribution search - CRM-9998
• Multiple membership renewal reminders - CRM-8359
• Batch entry of contributions and membership payments (quick input of batches of checks). Read more here- CRM-9834
• Replace hard-code email address in online event registration forms with a reserved profile, and allow online event registration forms to NOT collect email addresses - CRM-9587
• Support price sets for recurring contributions - CRM-9504

Want to learn more? Check out the complete list of ~75 improvements and bug fixes done in this stable version of 4.2

Downloads

You can download the release from SourceForge - select from the civicrm-stable section. The filenames include the 4.2.7labels, e.g. civicrm-4.2.7-drupal.tar.gz or civicrm-4.2.7-joomla.tar.gz or civicrm-4.2.7-wordpress.tar.gz. Make sure you're downloading the correct version: for Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress.

New Installations

If you are installing CiviCRM 4.2 from scratch, please use the corresponding automated installer instructions:

• Install CiviCRM 4.2 on Drupal 7
• Install CiviCRM 4.2 on Joomla 1.7
• Install CiviCRM 4.2 on Wordpress
• Drupal 6 (not officially supported)

Upgrading to 4.2

The procedure for upgrading is described in following documents:

• Upgrade Drupal Sites to 4.2
• Upgrade Joomla Sites to 4.2
• Upgrade WordPress Sites to 4.2

Contributors

Community support and engagement is the force that sustains and drives CiviCRM forward. This release would not have been possible without the incredible contributions of these people and organizations:

Abril Rocabert, Adam Wight, Alice Aguilar, Allen Shaw, Andres Spagarino, Andrew Harris, Andrew Hunt, Andrew Walker, Andre Gurgel, Anthony Camilleri, Ariel Gold, Bob Vincent, Brian Shaugnessy, Chris Burgess, Chris Ward, Coleman Watts, Dave D, Dave Moreton, Eileen McNaughton, Erik Brower, Erik Hommel, Frank Gomez, Graylin Kim, Jamie McClelland, Jane Hanley, Jason Bertolacci, Jeroen Bensch, Jim Meehan, Jon Goldberg, Jonathan Mark, Joe Murray, Kasia Wakarecy, Katie Horn, Katy Jockelson, Kellie Brownell, Ken West, Ken Zalewski, Lisa Jervis, Marianela Zucotti Bozzano, Mark Burdett, Mathieu Lutfy, Matt Niemayer, Micah Lee, Michael Daryabeygi, Michael McAndrew, Nicolas Ganivet, Noah Miller, Parvez Saleh, Peter Gehres, Peter McAndrew, Robyn Perry, Samuel Vanhove, Simon West, Stephane Lussier, Steve Colson, Stuart Gaston, Torrance Hodgeson, Xavier Dutoit.

AGH Strategies, Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Association for Learning Technology, Backoffice Thinking, Circle Interactive, CiviDesk, Community Builders, DC Roadrunners, EE-atWork, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Freeform Solutions, Free Software Foundation, Fuzion (NZ), Giant Rabbit, Gingko Street Labs, Kindling Trust, Koumbit, Korlon, International Mountain Biking Association,  JMA Consulting, Lighthouse Consulting and Design, National Democratic Institute, New York State Senate, Ninjitsu Web Development, Nonprofit Solutions, NS Web Solutions, Palentetech, Progressive Technology Project, River Pool at Beacon, San Francisco Baykeeper,  Switchback, Tech to the People,  The Monthly, Third Sector Design, Veda Consulting, Voluntary Action Westminster,  Woolman Sierra Friends Center, Woven, Zing.

Date/time: Wednesday 27th February, 2013 6:00 PM  (till 8:30PM)

Location: Gamesys, 10 Piccadilly, 4th Floor Reception, London, W1J 0DD

Registration: http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=284

The team is super excited to announce the third alpha release for 4.3 with support for Drupal 7.x, Joomla 2.5.x and WordPress.

Please remember this is an ALPHA release and it should NOT be used on production sites - however, we  strongly encourage everyone to upgrade a copy of your current site(s) on a test server and let us know about any bugs or problems. Join the Community Release Testing initiative to help ensure an awesome stable release!

What's new?

Here are the "Top 10 Reasons to Get Excited for CiviCRM 4.3". In addition to this 1030+ issues have been fixed which are part of 4.3

Want to learn more? Check out the complete list of new and improved functionality on the issue tracker.
 

You can also test drive the release on each platform using the public sandboxes:

• CiviCRM 4.3 on Drupal 7
• CiviCRM 4.3 on Joomla 2.5
• CiviCRM 4.3 on Wordpress

Please spend some time running through your critical workflows on these sandboxes, and report any bugs or issues on the release testing forum board.
 

Step up and help out!

The moment of releasing CiviCRM 4.3.alpha3 is a great occasion to get involved in CiviCRM community. There are many ways you can help make this release better and bug free.
 

• Log in to the one of the sandboxes and try out the features you or your clients use regularly. If you find a problem, first check the open issues list on the issue tracker to see if it's already been reported. If not, please report it on the appropriate forum board. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset.
• Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 4.3 - let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you've done this, play around with your favorite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 4.3 release testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers!
   
• If you're a developer and have PHP skills, we strongly encourage you to develop and attach a code patch AND a unit test along with any bug you report through our issue tracker. Ping us on IRC if you need help figuring out how to do this.

Downloads

You can download the release from SourceForge - select from the civicrm-latest section. The filenames include the 4.3.alpha3 labels, e.g. civicrm-4.3.alpha3-drupal.tar.gz or civicrm-4.3.alpha3-joomla.tar.gz or civicrm-4.3.alpha3-wordpress.tar.gz. Make sure you're downloading the correct version: for Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress.

New Installations

If you are installing CiviCRM 4.3.alpha3 from scratch, please use the corresponding automated installer instructions:

• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Drupal 7
• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Joomla 2.5
• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Wordpress

Upgrading to 4.3.alpha3

The procedure for upgrading is described in following documents:

• Upgrade Drupal 7 / CiviCRM 4.0 Sites to 4.3
• Upgrade Joomla Sites to 4.3
• Upgrade WordPress Sites to 4.3

We will continue to include automated upgrades for subsequent alpha releases of 4.3 - so you should be able to upgrade your test site easily over the course of the release cycle.

Contributors

Community support and engagement is the force that sustains and drives CiviCRM forward. This release would not have been possible without the incredible contributions of these people and organizations:

Adam Wight, Allen Shaw, Andres Spagarino, Andrew Harris, Andrew Hunt, Andrew Walker, Alice Aguilar, Andre Gurgel, Bob Vincent, Brian Shaugnessy, Chris Burgess, Coleman Watts, Dave D, Dave Moreton, Eileen McNaughton, Erik Brower, Erik Hommel, Frank Gomez, Graylin Kim, Henry Bennett, Jamie McClelland, Jason Bertolacci, Jag Kandasamy, Jeroen Bensch, Jim Meehan, Jon Goldberg, Jonathan Mark, Joe Murray, Ken West, Ken Zalewski, Marianela Zucotti Bozzano, Mathieu Lutfy, Matt Chapman, Matt Niemayer, Micah Lee, Michael Labriola, Michael McAndrew, Nicolas Ganivet, Noah Miller, Parvez Saleh, Peter McAndrew, Rajesh Sundararajan, Samuel Vanhove, Stephane Lussier, Steve Colson, Stuart Gaston, Tim Otten, Tom Kirkpatrick, Torrance Hodgeson, Xavier Dutoit.

AGH Strategies, Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Association for Learning Technology, Backoffice Thinking, Circle Interactive, CiviDesk, Community Builders, DC Roadrunners, EE-atWork, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Fuzion (NZ), Giant Rabbit, Gingko Street Labs, Kindling Trust, Koumbit, Korlon, International Mountain Biking Association,  JMA Consulting, Lighthouse Consulting and Design, National Democratic Institute, New York State Senate, NfP Services (MTL Software Group), Nonprofit Solutions, NS Web Solutions, Palentetech, Progressive Technology Project, River Pool at Beacon, San Francisco Baykeeper,  Switchback, Tech to the People,  The Monthly, Third Sector Design, Veda Consulting, Voluntary Action Westminster,  Woolman Sierra Friends Center, Woven, Zing.

'Is it that time of the release cycle already?', I hear ye sayeth! Well yes my medieval friends, it is! Version 4.3 has some lovely new features and I'm sure you will want to be upgrading soon.

If you have lived through a couple of versions of CiviCRM, then you will likely know the value of release testing - especially if you never got round to doing any! But rather go into the gruesome consequences of not testing, I thought I would let you know thatthere is another way!

Paul Delbar has been doing some amazing work on community release testing (inc. this lovely image that you should print out and distribute to all your friends and colleagues) and for all of you that like and need a bit of encouragement we will be bug smithing together on Friday 8th March.

Please note this next bit is important so I bold AND italicised it:

Bug smithing is not just for techies! Check out this awesome infographic for tips on getting started whether you are a user, integrator or developer.

So how do you get involved in bug smithing day?

1. block out Friday 8th March in your diary
2. read about community release testing<-that page is filled with resources to get you started
3. sign up and let us know what you are interested in testing
4. Get testing on the 8th! There will be lots of people about in IRC (CiviCRM's chat room) to help with any questions you have.

For those of us that have tried CiviReport with ACL's and custom data, we'll be aware of the issue that in order to use the custom data in reports the user must have Access All Custom Data privilege enabled. This is not the desired functionality and thanks to funding from Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research a patch is available which cures the problem, allowing you to use ACL's with Custom data without compromising the CiviReport functionality.

You can get the patch from the following JIRA issue

http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-11962

Parvez

www.vedaconsulting.co.uk

Three years ago I set up a Drupal-based community site for our children’s K-8 public charter school. As the school’s needs grew, I integrated CiviCRM to enable online enrollment, tour registration, ticket sales, volunteer hour tracking, and other functionality that had previously been accomplished through unwieldy paper forms.

As I began to work more closely with a local arts education non-profit, I realized the lessons I had learned from working on the school site were directly applicable to the organization’s needs. SFArtsED runs a summer camp program for children. Till this year, all registrations were completed  on a paper form that was sent, along with a check, via snail mail. The Registrar mailed back four forms to the parent, who filled them out and mailed them back to SFArtsEd, along with a receipt for payment. Last month I set out modernize their camp enrollment process using Drupal, CiviCRM, Ubercart and Webform Integration.

Class Enrollment– The enrollment process now takes place via shopping cart functionality in Ubercart. Each class is set up as a product, as are optional morning and afternoon extended care sessions. Parents can browse the camps offerings, and are instructed to complete a separate order for each child. Each child’s first and last name is added to the user’s UC address information with UC Extra Fields Pane (http://drupal.org/project/uc_extra_fields_pane) to differentiate multiple orders by the same parent for multiple children.  The UC Discount Coupons module automatically applies discounts for multiple sessions, and allows the user to take a 10% sibling discount (http://drupal.org/project/uc_coupon).

Forms Completion - With Ubercart/CiviCRM integration (http://drupal.org/project/uc_civicrm) a Civi account is created for the user as soon as they complete a purchase. Through Rules integration, the completion of an order sends them an invoice and a link to a set of Webforms. Once they’ve logged in, their own basic information (name, email, phone, address) is auto-populated into the form. Using Webform CiviCRM Integration (http://drupal.org/project/webform_civicrm), each form is build with three contacts – User 1, an existing contact – the current logged in parent account, User 2, a Summer Camp Student contact subtype, where the parent can add the child’s information, and User 3, fields for a second parent. The parent is guided through four pages of custom fields including emergency contact information, family background, student pick-up authorizations and a liability waiver. Webforms Integration creates the Parent/Child relationships for each submission. All of this information is now available on a single Civi contact screen, instead of across pages of paper in folders.

Reporting– As a non-profit serving children, the organization is often asked to report on student demographics, including race/ethnicity of students, as well as public vs. private school enrollment. In addition, staff keeps notes regarding student’s skills and abilities to help track their creative development. A custom set of fields is available to the camp administrators to help them track and report on these attributes.

Future Enhancements  - When I learned the specifics of SFArtEd’s needs for summer camp enrollment, I knew that Drupal/Civi/UC were the perfect way to achive the desired results. But as a non-profit, they have multiple other stakeholders including donors and guest artists. I am hoping to extend Civi to provide an all-encompassing CRM that they can leverage for fundraising, ticket sales, and email blasts to their constituents.

The total concept to launch time for this project was almost exactly a month, time outside of my regular job and parenting responsibilities. I can’t imagine making this happen without Civi, Webforms Integration, Ubercart and a lot of great advice from the Civi Community!

If you follow the CiviCRM blog, you've probably seen a few articles about how much fun the sprints are and what a great time everyone has. Maybe you've thought to yourself, "That's not for me. I'm not a PHP programmer or a database fanatic." Well, I'm here to say that you, yes you can come to the sprint - if you don't write code you can help write the user guide. The only prerequisites are enthusiasm about CiviCRM and a willingness to help out (and a laptop). The food is great, the people are fantastic, and you will have fun, I promise.

This spring we're having a big sprint after CiviCON San Francisco. We'll be staying at the beautiful Woolman campus in the Sierra Nevada foothills April 28th - May 4th. We'll spend our time helping to make CiviCRM the best it can be, eating delicious food, and exploring the Yuba river and historic Nevada City CA.

Click here for more information

Please contact me - coleman at civicrm dot org if you have any questions.

Hope to see you there!

CiviCRM is currently used by thousands of organizations around the world, and an increasing percentage of the product and associated services come directly from the community. At the same time, as with any open source project, there are core 'keeping the lights on' activities that are critical to ensure the ongoing growth and health of the project.

We need to ensure that the release cycle is steady and solid, that our servers and infrastructure are looked after, that people with good ideas can find each other, and we need to do all those things that everyone agrees are great ideas anybut no-one can quite get around to finding the time to do!

Think about Wikipedia...  it's an amazing resource because of all of the contributions made by various wikipedians, but without a server infrastructure to run everything on, there would be no Wikipedia. Without a well oiled machine at the heart of CiviCRM, we wouldn't be able to put people's contributions to best use.

The funding for these core activities has been primarily covered by a small number of sponsors until now. However long term sustainability requires that we expand our financial base, and one of the approaches we're considering is incorporating a direct ask for financial support into CiviCRM's user interface. The new 'Support CiviCRM' fund-raising widget would be displayed on 'back-end' pages periodically, and might look like this:

The widget would link to a new contribution page which recommends a $25 / month (or more) recurring contribution to the 'Core Activities Fund' - includes an overview of what the fund is used for.  We might also include a progress bar and some other useful info-graphics. The widget would also be displayed during upgrades, and incorporated into the 'Register Your Site" flow.

We haven't fleshed out technical implementation details yet, we're pretty sure we want the content of the 'ask' (both the message and the layout)  to be driven from a central server. This should allow us to experiment with messaging, frequency, etc. over time. Another idea we are thinking through is linking this widget to the site registration, which would allow us to tailor our ask depending on past giving history.  For example we could not ask if someone has donated in the last x months or has a regular donation set up.  Or we could adjust the ask amount dependent on past giving history.

Although we think it's reasonable to ask users to support the project periodically, there are likely to be situations where displaying the widget might be inappropriate. We are considering options for dismissing or opting out, including a simple 'checkbox' on the widget. Thoughts on this would be welcome.

Given the goal of converting a larger percentage of the community into supporters, what do folks think about this approach? Suggestions from fundraising experts in the community for making this compelling and avoiding pitfalls are particularly welcome.
 

The team is super excited to announce the first beta release for 4.3 with support for Drupal 7.x, Joomla 2.5.x and WordPress.

Please remember this is an BETA release and it should NOT be used on production sites - however, we  strongly encourage everyone to upgrade a copy of your current site(s) on a test server and let us know about any bugs or problems. Join the Community Release Testing initiative to help ensure an awesome stable release!

What's new?

Here are the "Top 10 Reasons to Get Excited for CiviCRM 4.3". In addition to this 1030+ issues have been fixed which are part of 4.3

Want to learn more? Check out the complete list of new and improved functionality on the issue tracker.
 

You can also test drive the release on each platform using the public sandboxes:

• CiviCRM 4.3 on Drupal 7
• CiviCRM 4.3 on Joomla 2.5
• CiviCRM 4.3 on Wordpress

Please spend some time running through your critical workflows on these sandboxes, and report any bugs or issues on the release testing forum board.
 

Step up and help out!

The moment of releasing CiviCRM 4.3.alpha3 is a great occasion to get involved in CiviCRM community. There are many ways you can help make this release better and bug free.
 

• Log in to the one of the sandboxes and try out the features you or your clients use regularly. If you find a problem, first check the open issues list on the issue tracker to see if it's already been reported. If not, please report it on the appropriate forum board. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset.
• Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 4.3 - let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you've done this, play around with your favorite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 4.3 release testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers!
   
• If you're a developer and have PHP skills, we strongly encourage you to develop and attach a code patch AND a unit test along with any bug you report through our issue tracker. Ping us on IRC if you need help figuring out how to do this.

Downloads

You can download the release from SourceForge - select from the civicrm-latest section. The filenames include the 4.3.alpha3 labels, e.g. civicrm-4.3.alpha3-drupal.tar.gz or civicrm-4.3.alpha3-joomla.tar.gz or civicrm-4.3.alpha3-wordpress.tar.gz. Make sure you're downloading the correct version: for Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress.

New Installations

If you are installing CiviCRM 4.3.alpha3 from scratch, please use the corresponding automated installer instructions:

• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Drupal 7
• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Joomla 2.5
• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Wordpress

Upgrading to 4.3.alpha3

The procedure for upgrading is described in following documents:

• Upgrade Drupal 7 / CiviCRM 4.0 Sites to 4.3
• Upgrade Joomla Sites to 4.3
• Upgrade WordPress Sites to 4.3

We will continue to include automated upgrades for subsequent alpha releases of 4.3 - so you should be able to upgrade your test site easily over the course of the release cycle.

Contributors

Community support and engagement is the force that sustains and drives CiviCRM forward. This release would not have been possible without the incredible contributions of these people and organizations:

Adam Wight, Allen Shaw, Andres Spagarino, Andrew Harris, Andrew Hunt, Andrew Walker, Alice Aguilar, Andre Gurgel, Bob Vincent, Brian Shaugnessy, Chris Burgess, Coleman Watts, Dave D, Dave Moreton, Eileen McNaughton, Erik Brower, Erik Hommel, Frank Gomez, Graylin Kim, Henry Bennett, Jamie McClelland, Jason Bertolacci, Jag Kandasamy, Jeroen Bensch, Jim Meehan, Jon Goldberg, Jonathan Mark, Joe Murray, Ken West, Ken Zalewski, Marianela Zucotti Bozzano, Mathieu Lutfy, Matt Chapman, Matt Niemayer, Micah Lee, Michael Labriola, Michael McAndrew, Nicolas Ganivet, Noah Miller, Parvez Saleh, Peter McAndrew, Rajesh Sundararajan, Samuel Vanhove, Stephane Lussier, Steve Colson, Stuart Gaston, Tim Otten, Tom Kirkpatrick, Torrance Hodgeson, Xavier Dutoit.

AGH Strategies, Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Association for Learning Technology, Backoffice Thinking, Circle Interactive, CiviDesk, Community Builders, DC Roadrunners, EE-atWork, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Fuzion (NZ), Giant Rabbit, Gingko Street Labs, Kindling Trust, Koumbit, Korlon, International Mountain Biking Association,  JMA Consulting, Lighthouse Consulting and Design, National Democratic Institute, New York State Senate, NfP Services (MTL Software Group), Nonprofit Solutions, NS Web Solutions, Palentetech, Progressive Technology Project, River Pool at Beacon, San Francisco Baykeeper,  Switchback, Tech to the People,  The Monthly, Third Sector Design, Veda Consulting, Voluntary Action Westminster,  Web Access, Woolman Sierra Friends Center, Woven, Zing.

As of March 1st, the official source-code repository of CiviCRM has switched from Subversion to Github. Git and Github provide a number of advantages:

• Popular among FOSS projects and web developers.
• Free as in beer and (mostly) free as in speech.
• Supports off-line development.
• Supports lightweight branching, merging, and code-review.
• Supports open teams – anyone can jump-in, make changes, and share changes.

For instructions on converting an existing installation (based on SVN or tarball) to a git checkout, see:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC43/GitHub+for+CiviCRM

As you get to developing and submitting patches, please try out Github's "pull-request" process. This process allows you all the benefits of git and github (publishing, offline development, lightweight branching, online code browser, etc) without requiring prior approval from anyone. In the future, we'll provide extra features for pull-requests (such as automatic validation against the test-suite).

Release Notes

• The repository structure has changed. Previously, there were two SVN repositories ("civicrm" and "tools"). The new structure is described on the wiki.
• bin/setup.conf has changed. The SVNROOT variable is now called CIVISOURCEDIR.
• The path to SeleniumRC has changed from "tools/packages/SeleniumRC" to "packages/SeleniumRC".
• If you were involved with testing the experimental "wariocrm" repositories, be sure to delete anything based on them. Mixing data between "civicrm" and "wariocrm" could produce significant confusion.
• If you've previously maintained your own forked repository based on CiviCRM, then you'll need to make changes. Git provides great tools for maintaining forks, but we don't have any great documents describing that. Feel free to contact us or to share your experiences in switching over.

Hey all!

We're really pleased to release a little extension which adds a contact calendar to the contact record.

The calendar shows activities where contact is assignee or a target contact in a Day / week / month view and is useful for helping to schedule future activites for your contacts.

It's currently in Alpha - so please let us know if you have any issues or comments!

For more details of the extension see:

http://civicrm.org/extensions/contact-calendar

and the source code is kept at Compucorp's github page:

https://github.com/Compucorp/uk.co.compucorp.civicrm.contactcalendar

We're hoping to add a few features to this in the future including hopefully adding it to the contact dashboard for when you log in.

Wish you all well to use it!

Team Compucorp

Date/time: Wednesday 27th March 2013, 5:30pm - 8:30pm

Venue: tbc

Information/Registration: http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=288

The team is super excited to announce the second beta release for 4.3 with support for Drupal 7.x, Joomla 2.5.x and WordPress.

Please remember this is a BETA release and it should NOT be used on production sites - however, we  strongly encourage everyone to upgrade a copy of your current site(s) on a test server and let us know about any bugs or problems. Join the Community Release Testing initiative to help ensure an awesome stable release!

What's new?

Here are the "Top 10 Reasons to Get Excited for CiviCRM 4.3". In addition to this 1100+ issues have been fixed which are part of 4.3

Want to learn more? Check out the complete list of new and improved functionality on the issue tracker.
 

You can also test drive the release on each platform using the public sandboxes:

• CiviCRM 4.3 on Drupal 7
• CiviCRM 4.3 on Joomla 2.5
• CiviCRM 4.3 on Wordpress

Please spend some time running through your critical workflows on these sandboxes, and report any bugs or issues on the release testing forum board.
 

Step up and help out!

The moment of releasing CiviCRM 4.3.beta2 is a great occasion to get involved in CiviCRM community. There are many ways you can help make this release better and bug free.
 

• Log in to the one of the sandboxes and try out the features you or your clients use regularly. If you find a problem, first check the open issues list on the issue tracker to see if it's already been reported. If not, please report it on the appropriate forum board. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset.
• Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 4.3 - let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you've done this, play around with your favorite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 4.3 release testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers!
   
• If you're a developer and have PHP skills, we strongly encourage you to develop and attach a code patch AND a unit test along with any bug you report through our issue tracker. Ping us on IRC if you need help figuring out how to do this.

Downloads

You can download the release from SourceForge - select from the civicrm-latest section. The filenames include the 4.3.beta2 labels, e.g. civicrm-4.3.beta2-drupal.tar.gz or civicrm-4.3.beta2-joomla.tar.gz or civicrm-4.3.beta2-wordpress.tar.gz. Make sure you're downloading the correct version: for Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress.

New Installations

If you are installing CiviCRM 4.3.beta2 from scratch, please use the corresponding automated installer instructions:

• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Drupal 7
• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Joomla 2.5
• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Wordpress

Upgrading to 4.3.beta2

The procedure for upgrading is described in following documents:

• Upgrade Drupal 7 / CiviCRM 4.0 Sites to 4.3
• Upgrade Joomla Sites to 4.3
• Upgrade WordPress Sites to 4.3

We will continue to include automated upgrades for subsequent beta releases of 4.3 - so you should be able to upgrade your test site easily over the course of the release cycle.

Contributors

Community support and engagement is the force that sustains and drives CiviCRM forward. This release would not have been possible without the incredible contributions of these people and organizations:

Adam Wight, Allen Shaw, Andres Spagarino, Andrew Harris, Andrew Hunt, Andrew Walker, Alice Aguilar, Andre Gurgel, Bob Vincent, Brian Shaugnessy, Chris Burgess, Coleman Watts, Dave D, Dave Moreton, Eileen McNaughton, Erik Brower, Erik Hommel, Frank Gomez, Graylin Kim, Henry Bennett, Jamie McClelland, Jason Bertolacci, Jag Kandasamy, Jeroen Bensch, Jim Meehan, Jon Goldberg, Jonathan Mark, Joe Murray, Ken West, Ken Zalewski, Marianela Zucotti Bozzano, Mathieu Lutfy, Matt Chapman, Matt Niemayer, Micah Lee, Michael Labriola, Michael McAndrew, Nicolas Ganivet, Noah Miller, Parvez Saleh, Peter McAndrew, Rajesh Sundararajan, Samuel Vanhove, Stephane Lussier, Steve Colson, Stuart Gaston, Tim Otten, Tom Kirkpatrick, Torrance Hodgeson, Xavier Dutoit.

AGH Strategies, Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Association for Learning Technology, Backoffice Thinking, Circle Interactive, CiviDesk, Community Builders, DC Roadrunners, EE-atWork, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Fuzion (NZ), Giant Rabbit, Gingko Street Labs, Kindling Trust, Koumbit, Korlon, International Mountain Biking Association,  JMA Consulting, Lighthouse Consulting and Design, National Democratic Institute, New York State Senate, NfP Services (MTL Software Group), Nonprofit Solutions, NS Web Solutions, Palentetech, Progressive Technology Project, River Pool at Beacon, San Francisco Baykeeper,  Switchback, Tech to the People,  The Monthly, Third Sector Design, Veda Consulting, Voluntary Action Westminster,  Web Access, Woolman Sierra Friends Center, Woven, Zing.

After several dead ends I think we have something that is useful to share - just add a Tag - not as useful as having it as an Action after Adv Search perhaps - but with other possibilities that I like.

We repeatedly hit the problem of needing to create Drupal Users for civicrm contacts. While we have used the User Import module in D6 and D7 it required a bunch of steps that we wanted to sidestep. And while the Action for an Individual Contact is useful, it does not do the whole Drupal thing of sending out the 'you have an account' email.

Using Rules in Drupal was the way we have been exploring. Originally I wanted to do it via Activity but we hit the issue that we weren't getting it to apply to the Target, rather than the Assignee - and now I see that even if we had, it would have cut off another option.

We tried via Groups - to much inconsistency says Eileen. We could have gone via Custom Fields, but wanted to make this easily shared.

So the outcome is a Rule that creates a Drupal user and fires out the welcome email whenever a Contact is tagged with (Tag ID = whatever you specify) - in our case the tag is called 'create Drupal account'

After various gotchas - how it handles dealing with multiple contacts, or on multisites with different Drupal tables - I can finally report that it works when tagging a new contact at first point of creating (eg New Individual), as well as when tagging one or more contacts (eg after Search). Cool.

But wait I thought, will it also work when doing a CiviCRM Import of contacts - well yes it does. Nice!

And what about if I tag contacts when creating them via a Webform (another source of frustration that we had tried directly via Rules, but were hitting the problem that the Drupal User was creating a duplicate civi contact) - again yes. And a bonus for us at least - having not gone down the Activity route leaves us free to create a different Activity via the Webform-CiviCRM if required.

Only downside at this point is we end up with people having a Tag that we have no use for (the tag, not the contacts) - but a Smart Group that we de-tag occassionaly can take care of that for now.

What do you need to try this out?

Grab CiviCRM Entity from https://github.com/eileenmcnaughton/civicrm_entity

Grab the attached Rule and import at <yoursite>/admin/config/workflow/rules/reaction/import

Then modify "Data Comparison: Parameter: Data to compare: [civicrm-entity-tag:tag-id] to be the ID of the Tag you want to use. 

eg at path <yoursite>/admin/config/workflow/rules/reaction/manage/rules_entity_tag_account_create

(see images below)

Let us know how you get on.

The CiviCRM community has reached another milestone: announcing the third beta release of 4.3 for Drupal 6-7, Joomla 2.5.x and WordPress. This has been a true community effort with people from around the world participating in Ye Bugsmithing Day - 45 issues were fixed as a result of that group effort. And in case you missed that one, look for an imminent announcement of the 2nd and final 4.3 bug hunt! Your help makes all the difference.

Please remember this is a BETA release and it should NOT be used on production sites - however, we  strongly encourage everyone to upgrade a copy of your current site(s) on a test server and let us know about any bugs or problems. Join the Community Release Testing initiative to help ensure an awesome stable release!

What's new?

Here are the "Top 10 Reasons to Get Excited for CiviCRM 4.3". In addition to this 1100+ issues have been fixed which are part of 4.3

Want to learn more? Check out the complete list of new and improved functionality on the issue tracker.
 

You can also test drive the release on each platform using the public sandboxes:

• CiviCRM 4.3 on Drupal 7
• CiviCRM 4.3 on Joomla 2.5
• CiviCRM 4.3 on Wordpress

Please spend some time running through your critical workflows on these sandboxes, and report any bugs or issues on the release testing forum board.
 

Step up and help out!

The moment of releasing CiviCRM 4.3.beta3 is a great occasion to get involved in CiviCRM community. There are many ways you can help make this release better and bug free.

• Log in to the one of the sandboxes and try out the features you or your clients use regularly. If you find a problem, first check the open issues list on the issue tracker to see if it's already been reported. If not, please report it on the appropriate forum board. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset.
• Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 4.3 - let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you've done this, play around with your favorite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 4.3 release testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers!
   
• If you're a developer and have PHP skills, we strongly encourage you to develop and attach a code patch AND a unit test along with any bug you report through our issue tracker. Ping us on IRC if you need help figuring out how to do this.

Downloads

You can download the release from SourceForge - select from the civicrm-latest section. The filenames include the 4.3.beta3 labels, e.g. civicrm-4.3.beta3-drupal.tar.gz or civicrm-4.3.beta3-joomla.tar.gz or civicrm-4.3.beta3-wordpress.tar.gz. Make sure you're downloading the correct version: for Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress.

New Installations

If you are installing CiviCRM 4.3 from scratch, please use the corresponding automated installer instructions:

• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Drupal 7
• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Joomla 2.5
• Install CiviCRM 4.3 on Wordpress

Upgrading to 4.3

The procedure for upgrading is described in following documents:

• Upgrade Drupal 7 / CiviCRM 4.0 Sites to 4.3
• Upgrade Joomla Sites to 4.3
• Upgrade WordPress Sites to 4.3

We will continue to include automated upgrades for subsequent beta releases of 4.3 - so you should be able to upgrade your test site easily over the course of the release cycle.

Contributors

Community support and engagement is the force that sustains and drives CiviCRM forward. This release would not have been possible without the incredible contributions of these people and organizations:

Adam Wight, Allen Shaw, Andres Spagarino, Andrew Harris, Andrew Hunt, Andrew Walker, Alice Aguilar, Andre Gurgel, Bob Vincent, Brian Shaughnessy, Chris Burgess, Coleman Watts, Dave D, Dave Moreton, Eileen McNaughton, Erik Brower, Erik Hommel, Frank Gomez, Graylin Kim, Henry Bennett, Jamie McClelland, Jason Bertolacci, Jag Kandasamy, Jeroen Bensch, Jim Meehan, Jon Goldberg, Jonathan Mark, Joe Murray, Ken West, Ken Zalewski, Marianela Zucotti Bozzano, Mathieu Lutfy, Matt Chapman, Matt Niemayer, Micah Lee, Michael Labriola, Michael McAndrew, Nicolas Ganivet, Noah Miller, Parvez Saleh, Peter McAndrew, Paul Delbar, Rajesh Sundararajan, Samuel Vanhove, Stephane Lussier, Steve Colson, Stuart Gaston, Tim Otten, Tom Kirkpatrick, Torrance Hodgeson, Xavier Dutoit.

AGH Strategies, Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Association for Learning Technology, Backoffice Thinking, Circle Interactive, CiviDesk, Community Builders, DC Roadrunners, EE-atWork, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Fuzion (NZ), Giant Rabbit, Gingko Street Labs, Kindling Trust, Koumbit, Korlon, International Mountain Biking Association,  JMA Consulting, Lighthouse Consulting and Design, National Democratic Institute, New York State Senate, NfP Services (MTL Software Group), Nonprofit Solutions, NS Web Solutions, Palentetech, Progressive Technology Project, River Pool at Beacon, San Francisco Baykeeper,  Switchback, Tech to the People,  The Monthly, Third Sector Design, Veda Consulting, Voluntary Action Westminster,  Web Access, Woolman Sierra Friends Center, Woven, Zing.

When you think of it, it's quite amazing : open source communities bring out the best in people. Like all of you who participated in the first Bug Smithing Day, and ran 4.3 beta through a series of real-life tests, upgrades and API scripts. Even if you didn't find a bug, thou art truly thanked for thy effort.

As we promised, there's a prize for the Knight who hunted best, based on the number of 'kills' verified by the core team as being actual Bugs. The honor (and believe me, it truly is) goes to George Lozier of Phoenix Academy, who found three critters. For that Feat, he's awarded ye Big Prize : a complimentary entrance to CiviCON San Francisco, where he shall be welcomed and henceforth called Sir George, Smither of Bugs.

'Well', we thought, 'this was fun - why not do it again ?'

With beta's coming out every week, we'ld nearly forget that the ultimate goal is to put out the real thing : a stable, performant, easily upgrading CiviCRM 4.3. Looking at the issue statistics, we're in the home stretch.

So join us for the ultimate push : on Friday March 22nd, we'll kick off the next episode of Bug Smithing. If Friday isn't thy day, take the weekend, or the Monday after -- as long as you poke beta 4 until bugs come out.

I want to see the Bug Smithing banner underneath your emails, I want people to call eachother Sir on IRC, and above all, I want us all to put 4.3 to the most excruciating test you can imagine. Smithe !