Announcing CiviCRM v1.7 Beta

[lobo]

We are excited to announce that our 1.7 Beta release is now available for download. This release features the new CiviEvent component, which provides integrated event registration and management,
along with a new "Contact Dashboard" which gives constituents a consolidated view of their subscriptions, contributions, event registrations and more.

Other release highlights include:
* Create and save re-usable email templates (with mail-merge tokens)
* CiviContribute plugins for Authorize.net and Google Checkout
* Use customized versions of templates for any screen
* One-click copying for existing Profiles, Contribution Pages and Events
* Restrict access to selected custom data fields and selected profile screens

..You can read the roadmap release summary here:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/disp ... viCRM+v1.7

... and see a complete listing of ALL (145+) new features, improvements and bug fixes here:
http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/secure/I ... stId=10195

We are also working on new, improved documentation and will be announcing "beta" documentation release next week. We will be looking for volunteers to help review the new docs.

Many of the additions and changes in 1.7 were heavily driven by your feedback and requests - and we hope they solve many more of your CRM requirements....

***********
Download
***********
You can download the 1.7 beta here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=177914

Tarball filenames include the 1.7 Beta label:  "v1.7.beta.....tgz". 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.x or PHP 5.x).

*******************
New Installations
*******************
If you are installing the beta from scratch, you can use the manual installation instructions linked below.

Drupal Installation (v1.7):
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence//x/xiw

Joomla / Mambo Installations
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence//x/ixI

**********************
Upgrading from 1.6
**********************
If you are upgrading an existing 1.6 site (working with a copy of the site-of course), we have provided a database upgrade script. Instructions for upgrading are here:

Drupal Upgrade:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence//x/xSw

Joomla / Mambo Upgrade:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence//x/lxs

*****************************
Reporting Issues and Bugs
*****************************
We look forward to getting your feedback on the release in the coming days. Bugs should be reported via our bug tracking system (linked on the bottom of every page). Please select v1.7 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. We will be updating the beta tarballs regularly over the next week or so - and we'll announce any major
changes or fixes on this list.

We are targeting final release in approximately 1-2 weeks.

*******
Demo
*******
The demo sites have are now running the v1.7 beta, so you can explore the new features:
http://demo.civicrm.org/

[revo2001]

When I try to install this on the most recent official release of Joomla I get errors thats things are already using things like com_banners, i remove com_banners (didn't need it anyways) and now it says something is already using com_contacts.

Help!

[jtclark]

1.7.beta.9239

Wow, ACL for Joomla... am I dreaming?

Thanks, guys.

[lobo]

unfortunately a bit of a dream (for now)

we have most of the functionality in place and works for joomla. HOWEVER to facilitate data migration and backward compatibility we use the CMS permissioning scheme to override ACLs

hence the joomla portion does not work as yet. We hope to fix this in 1.8 or 2.0

sorry about that

lobo

[jtclark]

That's OK.

I can at least see it coming.

I have enough to do 'til then getting my host to upgrade MySQL and PHP.

Mine is still running on on MySQL 4.0 (so far, so good) until they upgrade a server for me in the next week or two.

It's a great product.

Thanks to all.