Today I'm happy to announce the release of Review Board 1.7 RC 1, the last milestone (hopefully) before the final 1.7 release.

We had hoped to get this out the door a bit earlier, but decided to smooth over some rough edges to give people a better upgrade experience, and it was worth it.

1.7 RC fixes a large number of bugs, both those found in 1.7 beta 2 and those we've had in Review Board for some time. The UI should feel faster, smoother, with fewer jumpy editors and nice usability tweaks here and there.

Along with the bug fixes, we've laid the foundation for pluggable review UIs for different types of file attachments, introduced a couple new file attachment thumbnail renderers, and fully replaced screenshot review with image file attachment review.

Some major bugs with extensions have been fixed. In particular, the list of extensions and their configuration is now properly synchronized across all your web server threads/processes, and all URLs provided by extensions will no longer "randomly" fail to work.

The next big step before 1.7 is getting all our documentation done. We expect code changes to be at a minimum. The exceptions will be some UI polish and any major bugs that turn up in RC.

If you're looking to upgrade to 1.7 soon, we suggest giving 1.7 RC a try, as it'll more or less be what we'll ship for 1.7.

Full release notes are available.

Hello, world! To those who celebrated Thanksgiving this week, I hope you all had a great one, with delicious food and good company.

Tonight we've released Review Board 1.6.14. This is a large bug fix, performance enhancement, and feature enhancement release, and will probably be the last big 1.6.x release, as we're putting the finishing touches on 1.7.

Some of the highlights include:

• Support for very large files in the diff viewer. We clocked a 44,000 line file at just around 3 seconds, instead of several minutes in 1.6.13.
• Further improving loading times for review requests.
• API support for creating, modifying and deleting review groups and managing their user lists.
• More helpful text when configuring a repository path.
• Many bug fixes and minor improvements.

Full release notes are available.

As I said above, we're very close to the final 1.7 release now. We'll have a release candidate out any day, and barring any major problems, expect to have a final release within the next two weeks.

For over a year now, we've provided professional Review Board hosting for businesses at RBCommons. It's been a very good year and change, and we're celebrating by offering an End of the Year sale.

For a limited time, new signups and upgrades on the Small, Medium or Large plans will receive 50% off the price for 3 months.

If you're looking to get started with Review Board and don't feel like hosting it yourself, give us a try. There's never been a better time!