The wait is over! Our latest and greatest Review Board 1.7 is out and ready! This was a massive release, and is the first big step in taking Review Board in a new and exciting direction.
Lookin' good!
Review Board 1.7 offers a revamped look and feel and a variety of new features designed to improve the workflow for both users and administrators. There's improved issue tracking, better support for file attachments, moved file support in the diff viewer, extensions, a brand new administration UI, per-user timezone support, and more.
Better issue tracking
In 1.6, we introduced issue tracking. When writing a new comment, you could indicate that you have an issue that must be addressed before the change goes into the product. This was a huge improvement for many developers, as it gave them a bit of a to-do list.
In 1.7, we've improved issue tracking by actually showing a to-do list of all opened issues right on the review request. You can quickly look through what needs to be done, jump down to the discussion and comment, and jump back. The list of issues can be filtered by state or by reviewer. Never miss another filed issue in a flood of reviews.
Extensions
Starting in this release, we're greatly expanding what people will be able to do with Review Board. We've introduced two new concepts that, while young, we expect will become quite popular over time: Extension support, and pluggable review UIs.
Third parties wil be able to write new features and customizations that can be plugged into any standard Review Board install. These can add new fields to a review request, or dashboard views. New API. Content to any page. Administration dashboard widgets. They can perform actions when review requests are posted, or automate tasks in the database.
Extensions can also provide new review UIs for different types of files. Now, it's possible to write support for display the content of specific types of file, commenting on them, and displaying those comments in a review. It's not just about code anymore.
Over time, we'll provide official extensions, and an easier way to download and install them directly into your own Review Board.
New administration UI
The administration UI got a bit of a revamp. When you next log in, you'll see a dashboard of widgets showing statistics on your server, graphing activity, and showing a quick glance of your important settings.
A new top-level Extensions page was added that will show you what extensions are available on your system, and which are enabled. Through here, you can manage your extensions, configure them, and even inspect their database contents.
We've made improvements all throughout, and will be continuing to improve on it in the 1.7.x releases, and through new extensions.
A note about Windows
Starting in this release, we're dropping official support for running Review Board on a Windows server. We've found that many of our users who tried to install on Windows ended up with a frustrating install experience due to conflicting versions of Python and other modules in ways that just simply doesn't happen on other platforms.
The 1.6.x releases will continue to be supported on Windows, and technically, 1.7 should work as well. We just won't be offering support anymore for Windows-specific problems.
If you're running on Windows, we highly recommend installing Review Board on a Linux VM and running that in a product like VMware Workstation or ESXi/vSphere.
And Python 2.4
We've also dropped support for Python 2.4. If you need to upgrade, your best bet is to install on a modern Linux distribution, as compiling it yourself may be a bit of a headache. We recommend upgrading to something with Python 2.7, which will be supported long-term.
Other shiny things
You can see a breakdown of everything that's new in our release notes. And check out the rest of the screenshots to see our new features and style in action.
