Announcing CiviCRM 1.8 Beta

[Piotr Szotkowski]

We are excited to announce that our 1.8 Beta release is now available for download, as well as testing on our demo site. We rely on our dedicated users (that’s you) to install and test the beta in order to make sure we have a quality final release.

This release features finding and merging duplicate contacts (de-duping), event price sets, employer fields in profiles, improved admin control panel, RSS feeds for events, the ability to define multiple payment processors, and more; the CiviCRM 1.8 Roadmap describes all of the new features, while the resolved issues list sports the implementation details and lists fixed bugs.

Stay tuned for updates and instructions on CiviReport functionality. We are working on getting the sample reports cleaned up and compatible with the latest BIRT release.

Many of the additions and changes in 1.8 were heavily driven by your feedback and requests, and we hope they solve many more of your CRM requirements.

Download

You can download CiviCRM 1.8 Beta at our download page. The filenames include the 1.8 Beta label: civicrm-1.8.beta…. Be sure and select the correct version for your CMS (Drupal or Joomla) and for the version of PHP running on your server (PHP 4 or PHP 5).

New Installations

If you are installing CiviCRM 1.8 Beta from scratch, you can use the manual installation instructions linked below:

• Drupal Installation
• Joomla Installation

Upgrading from 1.7

If you are upgrading an existing 1.7 site (working with a copy of the site, of course), we have provided a database upgrade script. Instructions for upgrading are here:

• Drupal Upgrade
• Joomla Upgrade

Reporting Issues and Bugs

We look forward to getting your feedback on the release in the coming days. Bugs should be reported via our issue tracking system. Please select 1.8 in the ‘Fix For’ dropdown. You will need to register as a user – this ensures that we can follow-up with you on your bug reports if necessary. Please ensure that the bug you’ve found is not reported already; also, there still are some issues open against CiviCRM 1.8.

Demo

We’ve setup a demo site (both with Drupal and Joomla) with the current CiviCRM 1.8 Beta codebase (updated over time as we fix the remaining open issues). Feel free to click around and explore all of the new features.