CiviCon - the first ever 'global' CiviCRM conference - is coming to San Francisco on April 22nd. We're getting really excited about the fantastic array of speakers and sessions already on the agenda ....

• Nathan Yergler, Creative Commons CTO will be kicking off the day, sharing his thoughts about the importance of open source software like CiviCRM to the success of non-profits and grass roots organizations, why Civi is important to Creative Common's mission, and what the horizon looks like.
• Cedric Brown, Director of the Mitch Kapor Foundation, along with Mitch Kapor (via video link) will be closing the day with their thoughts on the benefit propositions of open source software.
• In between, there will be a lots of great user AND developer oriented sessions including:
  

The third BETA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Check out release highlights here!. (Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites.)

The second BETA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites.

This release includes several COOL new features:

• Personal Dashboards - ** NEW in this beta release ** Each CiviCRM user can now configure their own dashboard (CiviCRM Home) to include summary data that's important to their work. Any available 'CiviReports' can be embedded in the dashboard in tabular or graphical format. Check out some examples on Kurund's recent blog post.
• Contact Subtypes - Extend (and / or rename) the built-in contact types and create custom fields specific to a subtype (e.g. Staff vs. Volunteer custom fields). Thanks to the folks at Alpha International for sponsoring this much-requested feature (learn more...).
• HTML Emails for Receipts, Event Confirmations and more - Templates for all system-generated emails are now stored in the database and editable by administrators. You can easily add styles, logos and more to your emails.
• HTML layout overhaul for online contribution pages - Phase 1 in efforts to make front-end CiviCRM pages much easier to style / modify via CSS (learn more...). Thanks to Kyle Jaster and the folks at rayogram.com..
• Usability improvements - Streamlined DATE input and list sorting widgets. Prevent users from losing work by alerting them if they try to navigate away from a form with unsaved changes.
• Support for Price Sets in Online Contribution Pages - Provides the flexibility to incorporate more complex contribution options (e.g. "Contribute $25 more to receive our monthly magazine.").
• Custom Data Groups Extensibility - Custom data groups can now be shared between multiple types of Activities, Events, Participant Roles etc.
• Access Control for Reports - Access control list (ACL) based permissioning is now applied to report data.

The team has released version 3.0.3 stable today. This release includes 60+ bug fixes. We recommend that you review the list of fixes and upgrade your site as needed. New installations should definitely use 3.0.3.

Kudos to folks in the community who have reported and helped diagnose / fix bugs during this release cycle! Top bug hunter / squashers for this release include: Dave Jenkins, Graham Gilchrist, Jack Aponte, Joe Murray, Nathan Kinkade, Raphael Vering, Tim Otten, Will Brownsberger, and Xavier Dutoit.

A passionate posse of folks interested in advancing the state of non-profit software gathered this week at the Non-profit Software Development Summit. CiviCRM was a sponsor of the event which featured a full "track" of Civi-related events. Some civ-highlights from the conference:

• Helping some current users solve problems and get up to speed on more advance features in the CiviCRM 201 session. Our community does pretty amazing things in the "cloud" - but I really love having opportunities to interact with users and integrators and developers "live and in person". The feedback on 3.0 usability improvements (especially the new navigation menu) was super positive and very gratifying.
• Participating in Lobo's "action-packed" 60 minute session on Extending CiviCRM without Hacking Core. The more I play with all the things that can be done with our evolving hook functionality - the more excited I get.
• Joining with a group of CiviCRM integrators (and a few users) to brainstorm about Building the CiviCRM Community. This session was organized by the folks at Dharmatech - and partly inspired by a really cool book - The Art of Community - written by Jono Bacon who is the community manager for Ubuntu (a popular open source operating system distribution based on Debian Linux). It was exciting to collaborate in thinking about how folks with different interests and skills can potentially contribute towards strengthening the CiviCRM community and accelerating adoption of the platform. If you're interested in the ongoing sustainability of CiviCRM - I would encourage you to read Jono's book and think about what "team" you can join and / or create.

Thanks to Gunner and the team at Aspiration for organizing a great event!

The team is excited to announce that the first ALPHA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember this is an ALPHA release and it should NOT be used on production sites.

This release includes several major new features:

• Contact Subtypes - Extend (and / or rename) the built-in contact types and create custom fields specific to a subtype (e.g. Staff vs. Volunteer custom fields). Thanks to the folks at Alpha International for sponsoring this much-requested feature (learn more...).
• HTML Emails for Receipts, Event Confirmations and more - Templates for all system-generated emails are now stored in the database and editable by administrators. You can easily add styles, logos and more to your emails.
• HTML layout overhaul for online contribution pages - Phase 1 in efforts to make front-end CiviCRM pages much easier to style / modify via CSS (learn more...). Thanks to Kyle Jaster and the folks at rayogram.com..
• Usability improvements - Streamlined DATE input and list sorting widgets. Prevent users from losing work by alerting them if they try to navigate away from a form with unsaved changes.
• Support for price sets in Contribution - Allows the admin the flexibility to incorporate the more complex contribution options (e.g. "Contribute $25 more to receive our monthly magazine.").

... and lots of other improvements. Check out the 3.1 Roadmap for a good overview. Or you can review a compete listing of new features, improvements and bug fixes on the issue tracker.

The team has released version 3.0.1 today. This release includes critical fixes for the CiviCRM dashboard and Organization / Household contact editing. We recommend that sites currently running v3.0.0 upgrade to this version as soon as possible, especially if you are experiencing issues on the dashboard. The release also includes several other minor fixes.

After more than 7 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 3.0 Stable. We think that 3.0 marks a major milestone for CiviCRM - with major usability and workflow improvements and a new cleaner "look and feel". You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our public demo site.

Some of the exciting features in 3.0 include:

• Reporting - More than 20 reports are included in this release. You can customize these report instances AND create new instances with different filters and display columns from the Report Templates screens.
• Redesigned contact summary and contact edit screens - These screens have been completely redesigned to maximize readability. Tabs now display the number of records (e.g. contributions, events, etc.) - so you don't have to open a tab to see if the contact has any records of that type.
• Create contacts while recording contributions, memberships, event registrations and cases - Use the configurable "new contact" pop-up form to create a contact "inline" if a contact is not already in your database.
• Configurable drill-down menus - New navigation bar gives you one-click access to almost any screen or function. AND you can modify and rearrange the menus to suit your organizations needs. You can add links to commonly used profile forms, other related web applications...any web page.
• Improved Send Email screen - Includes support to CC and BCC, as well as improved layout.
• Context menu for contact actions - From any contact search results list, you can right-click a contact row with your mouse get a menu of actions such as "Record Contribution", "Register for Event" and more.
• Event Templates and streamlined event configuration screens - You can use event templates to simplify the process of creating similar events - store the common configuration settings in the template and then select it when you create a new event.
• A new unit testing framework and the first stages in building a comprehensive test suite which will significantly improve quality and stability of releases going forward.
• Powerful new hooks for integrators and developers who need to extend and customize existing features. Check out Lobo's blog for some detailed examples of customization via hooks.
• .... and 300+ additional improvements and bug fixes

You can find more detailed Release Highlights here.

Sorry for the short notice - but I just got a reminder that the deadline for submission of session suggestions for the 2010 NTC is this coming Monday (9/21). The conference is April 8-10 in Atlanta GA. Many of you have attended in the past - it's a pretty big deal at least for US non-profits.

It's definitely a great opportunity for exposure and can be an awesome way to help promote CiviCRM as a project.

I would encourage any of you who are interested in seeing CiviCRM related session(s) on the agenda to jump in a submit session suggestions (you can submit several):

Submit session suggestions here

In general, case study / success stories are well received ("Pump up your online fundraising with open source tools"). You do NOT need to volunteer to lead the session in order to suggest it (altho I suspect that helps) :-)

Last years sessions that had some CiviCRM content included:

• Selecting and Implementing Open Source Constituent Relationship Management: Views from the Trenches with CiviCRM, MPower & SugarCRM Users.
• Not your Parent's Custom Application: Building Exactly What you Need on top of a Platform
• CRM Sewing Circle

If you do submit sessions - let me know and we'll be sure to blog about them since the next step is a community voting process - and we can encourage folks in the community to vote for your sessions.

CiviCRM has included a plugin for interfacing United States Postal Services (USPS) Address Standardization web service for quite a number of releases. However, the USPS rules for using the service have been a bit hard to pin down and getting authorization from is apparently hit or miss. There have been a few forum posts indicating success using the plugin with CiviCRM versions 1.8 and possibly 1.9. However, since then we've pretty much only had reports of problems related to folks enabling the feature without having a valid account etc.