Howdy folks,

Christmas is here early! Today,we roll out an alpha release of Ushahidi v3.We know that most of you were expecting a Beta release this month, but we haven’t gotten there just yet. However, we’ve made substantial progress over the  past month, and have lots of cool stuff to show off.

Deployable yet?

Much like the developer release made a month ago, v3 isn't quite ready for production, so don't deploy/upgrade just yet ;). At this stage this is still mostly for developers try out V3, and maybe some tech-savvy deployers might want to try it out and experiment.

What’s New?

As with the previous release you should be able to get V3 installed, create and delete posts, view a list of posts and drill down to individual post pages. Some of the new functionality in this release include:-

· Search and edit posts

· Edit site settings

· Manage users

· Pull messages from SMS and turn them in to posts.

One of the simplest but most major improvements: you can log in, register and log out! You can access the public site without logging in at all!

For a full run down of what’s new and what is still pending, have a look at our blog post announcement and release notes

Thank you!

A special shout out goes out to those of you who grabbed our developer release and shared thoughts/comments on the installation process(John Kulova, Sara Farmer, Tryus Kamau - to mention a few). Your feedback went a long way into streamlining installation.

Take it for a Spin!

Grab the code on github, or download it here, then head over to the install instructions. Alternatively, just head over to the demo site and have a look. (If you want a quick way to spin up your own demo, try out our one-click deploy and install on Pagodabox)

For those of you who'd like to get their hands dirty and jump into the code, here's some detailed documentation on how to get involved in the development process.

Your opinions matter to us.

Feel free to get in touch with us via github issues/mailing list with any feedback you may have regarding v3. Got a feature you think would be useful that isn’t on the roadmap? Add it to the 3.0 wishlist and we'll have a look.

Join us for a v3 Q&A Hangout in January!

We're about to down our tools for the holidays, but still plan on hosting a virtual hangout with our lead developers sometime in January, to host any questions you may have. In the meantime, stay tuned on our blog, meetup page, twitter, facebook page and wiki for more announcements.

Happy Week, Folks