Major news for CiviCRM

The new version of CiviCRM includes support for Drupal 6 and 7, and for the first time, WordPress.The version is still in beta, but continued support for Drupal 6 is an enormous relief.

Just a few months ago a make it happen project extended support for updates for Drupal 6 through March 2012. Even that extension would have required us to upgrade our Drupal 6 site immediately. For us, and  many other small nonprofit clients who love and rely on CiviCRM, a required upgrade right away would have been extremely difficult. Heck, some organizations are just moving from Drupal 5, and the much-delayed release of Drupal 7 made it difficult to plan when to do an upgrade anyway.

Whew, I'm so grateful to our CiviCRM consultant, Andrew Hunt, for pointing this out to me today. I totally missed it in all the year end busyness.

I realize that the WordPress support is probably the bigger story for many people. It will certainly help with the South Philly Food Co-op. As a Drupal partisan it makes me a little sad though--the fact that CiviCRM was limited to Drupal (and Joomla) was a major point in weighing it against WordPress. That's no longer. But, pursuing WordPress integration is part of what allowed longer term support for Drupal 6, so I'm appreciative for that.

Viva open-source community collaboration!