I should have put something out about the new version of CivicCRM (1.5) last week, but it got buried with other priorities. My apologies to all the CivicCRM fans out there. I have not loaded CivicCRM myself, but my understanding is that CivicCRM is now based on the Drupal 4.7 code.

For those that do not recognize what CRM stands for, try customer relationship management at Wikipedia. Here is how CivicCRM describes the software in their announcement:

CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent
relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based,
internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of
advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

New features and enhancements you can expect in CivicCRM 1.5 include:

• A new membership management component
• Search Builder - a new tool for building complex search queries
• Significant memory and speed optimizations

"CiviCRM Community Skypecast will provide an overview of the new features in CiviCRM 1.5. July 06, 12:00 PST

Learn about features coming in v1.5. Ask questions, and share feedback, ideas, tips for using CiviCRM with other users, developers and folks from the CiviCRM core development team. (CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.)"

"This release includes the final CiviCRM 1.3 version and Drupal 4.6.6. /CivicSpace has/ made significant improvements to the administration interface. We have also included a new version of mass mailer that does not support PHP CLI, and should work in any standard PHP environment with CURL support. We are still raising funds to support the new..."