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CiviCRM version 5.81.0 is now ready to download. This is a regular monthly release. Upgrade now for the most stable CiviCRM experience:

Version 5.81 is a CiviCRM Extended Security Release (ESR).

We're bringing in the New Year by taking a break from the normal production of more CiviAcademy video tutorials in order to provide a light-hearted look at what may be equally important: what NOT to do in CiviCRM.

If you're new to CiviCRM or even considering using it, our Top 10 Most Common Mistakes Users Make in CiviCRM video showcase could prove to be an invaluable resource!

In line with our practice over recent years (per 7.3, 7.2, 7.1), we are ending our support for php 7.4 two years after PHP dropped support for it. This means that the 5.81 release will be the last CiviCRM release supporting PHP 7.4.

Yeah, you read that right. We’ve been working CiviCRM version 5 for so long now that it’s almost, but not quite, a household brand. That all changes on 5 March 2025 when the official release of CiviCRM 6 lands.

With the end-of-life, security updates for Drupal 7 will cease, leaving your CiviCRM website vulnerable to threats and potentially facing compatibility issues. It's crucial to understand your options and take action to ensure your site's security and functionality.

For 2025, the CiviCRM-D7 integration will continue to receive basic support, but usage is discouraged. Specifically:

CiviCRM version 5.80.0 is now ready to download. This is a regular monthly release. Upgrade now for the most stable CiviCRM experience:

Starting with Drupal 8, composer is used to manage web site dependencies and to download packages to the server. A Drupal and CiviCRM website requires 100s of packages to provide the large set of functional components. Composer simplifies the process of determining which versions of packages will all work together appropriately, and fetching all of them and putting them in the right place in the code base.

The CiviCRM community is going back to where it all started to celebrate 20 years of serving nonprofits. 

Start planning now to attend the event in the San Francisco area. 

There will be three parallel tracks of sessions over two days, packed with case studies and the latest in SearchKit, FormBuilder and new extensions.  

Planning for this gala event is already underway:

Mass email campaigns are a staple of digital marketing, providing a powerful way to reach a large audience quickly. However, ensuring that your email content resonates with your audience can be challenging. One of the most effective ways to optimise email performance is through A/B testing, a feature that has been core functionality for a long time and is now fully implemented using Mosaico.

CiviCRM version 5.79.0 is now ready to download. This is a regular monthly release. Upgrade now for the most stable CiviCRM experience:

The project #CiviOneClick aims to simplify access to CiviCRM – starting with an easy setup of demo sites but with the long-term goal of a new way to install CiviCRM.

CiviCRM Standalone has reached a significant milestone. We are now ready to make the November 5.80 release candidate “the RC” for a first official, stable release of the new Standalone in December.

It’s an exciting prospect, representing lots of work from across the community over the past couple of years. For me personally, getting to this stage has been a key focus of my work on CiviCRM this year.

Most developers in the CiviCRM community are probably familiar with Composer. If not, Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. That's just a fancy way of saying that composer allows codebases like CiviCRM to pull in code (dependencies) from other projects.

We recently experienced a massive slow down in one of our background jobs and tracked down the cause via redis tools to a cache clearing issue. I decided to write up how we tracked it down to share with other developers - but this blog post comes with a geekery warning : the target audience is definitely solidly in the developer space and assumes the reader has a lot of background knowledge.

Card-tumbling, like its evil relatives of automated spam, script kiddies and privacy breaches, is not a problem to be solved, but is a fact of life on the internet.

Recently, new strategies for bad actors means that even if you thought you'd fixed this, you might need to review your defenses.

If you've got a publicly accessible contribution page using an on-site payment processor, there's a good chance that you're a target.

Around July last year, I wrote a blog post about a few user interface changes that might go unnoticed to most (covering versions around 5.55 to 5.65). Here are a few more changes that have been introduced in versions 5.75 to 5.80.