After 18 months in development, the long awaited release of SilverStripe 3 is almost upon us, with the release of RC1 today.

Pending disaster, we are on track for releasing SilverStripe 3.0 stable at the end of June.

As usual with any release candidate, we haven’t added any new features since 3.0.0 beta 3. Instead, we’ve focused on ironing out bugs and performance issues. Speed and memory usage on the client-side has been much improved, and as a whole feels much more stable.

We’d love it if you downloaded RC1 and tried it out in your environment, to ensure that any final critical issues are identified and resolved.

As usual, if you find a bug, please create a ticket here: http://open.silverstripe.org/newticket. You will need an account on our Trac server.

We are extremely close, and to celebrate the stable launch of SilverStripe 3.0, we will be running a 24 hour worldwide hackfest. We’ll be burning the midnight oil at our Wellington offices, with a few hardy hackers staying for the entire time, and other groups will be joining us across the world during that time.

Previous hackfests have been about building SilverStripe 3, but this one is different. This time we’re looking to see what SilverStripe helps you to create. So, come with a project idea and see how the new tools in SilverStripe 3 can help you make it a reality.

The hackfest runs from 12pm Friday 29 June - 12pm Saturday 30 June, New Zealand time. In other timezones, that means:

Melbourne: 10am Friday 29 June - 10am Saturday 30 Jun

Germany: 2am Friday 29 June - 2am Saturday 30 June

New York: 8pm Thursday 28 June - 8pm Friday 28 June

San Francisco: 5pm Thursday 28 June - 5pm Friday 28 June

Local meetup groups have been organised all around the world. If you’re nearby, we invite you to join us:

If you’re not in one of these cities, you don’t need to miss out! Join in the fun on the IRC channel.

The next upcoming Meetups are in Copenhagen, Denmark and San Francisco, US.