XP-Dev.com Release Notes for Version 24

1. XP-Dev.com Release Notes for Version 24
   1. New Look and Feel
   2. Subversion 1.5
   3. Direct File Hosting
   4. Blogs for Projects
   5. Forums for Projects
      1. Forum Permission Settings
   6. Custom Bug States
   7. Time Tracking of Bugs
   8. Bug Fixes
      1. Links ending with brackets

New Look and Feel

After some deliberation, I decided that XP-Dev.com’s interface is just too difficult to use, and users tend to get lost using it (especially the Project Management suite).

Post your feeback and thoughts on the new UI on our forums.

Subversion 1.5

All repositories have been upgraded to Subversion 1.5. The biggest improvement over 1.4 is merge tracking information and performance improvements.

The original Subversion 1.5 release notes has more details on the changes .

In case anyone is wondering, XP-Dev.com repositories were not just upgraded using the command svnadmin upgrade. All repositories were rebuilt from scratch under 1.5 using svnadmin dump & svnadmin load. Moreover, the repositories have been re-built using FSFS as the underlying storage mechanism.

Direct File Hosting

If you turn on file hosting on any subversion repository, we’ll now host that whole repository at http://*repo name*.h.xp-dev.com.

An example is here: http://rs-myrepo.h.xp-dev.com/ source from my repository at http://svn.xp-dev.com/svn/rs-myrepo/

Full details on the Direct File Hosting Webpage

Please read the Disclaimer on Direct File Hosting before enabling it

Blogs for Projects

All projects have their own blogging section with an RSS feed. Do use this to communicate to your users/clients/customers about your project.

There will be more features coming up for the Blog section on each project – like customising the sidebar, processing of pingbacks and trackbacks, moderation of comments, etc.

Click here to see an example of the blog system at work which hosts XP-Dev.com’s own blog.

Forums for Projects

All projects have their own forum sections now. Forums can be either private or public.

Forum Permission Settings

Private forums:

• Not allow the general public or any other non-permissioned XP-Dev.com user to view
• Need to be permissioned as a project writer to be able to post new topics or comment in them.

Public forums:

• Allow the general public to view the forum
• Will need to be logged in as any XP-Dev.com user for them to post new topics or comment in them

Click here to view XP-Dev.com’s own forums as a working example of this new feature.

Custom Bug States

Each project tends to have their own bug lifecycle. Now XP-Dev.com projects can benefit from a custom bug states.

Just edit any project from your project list and add a new line for each state under Bug Status

Time Tracking of Bugs

Bugs now have an estimated time field, and you can add hours you’ve spent fixing the bug as well.

Additionally, you can assign bugs to iterations so that you can get a complete view on how long an iteration will take, or to put it another way – how many bugs you think you could fix in any given iteration.

Bug Fixes

Links ending with brackets

If you had a link that contains a bracket in any text form, it would not have included the final closing bracket as part of the link. These “brackets in links” are used heavily in Wikipedia. An example of this working is here)