What's New in Review Board

RBTools 0.7 is packed with new tools and improvements for your workflow, making it faster to install, post changes to Review Board, and land your changes.

There's a lot here, so we'll go into the major new additions.

Easy installation for Windows and MacOS X

We've improved the installation experience. If you're on Windows or MacOS X, you can simply download the RBTools installer for your platform. In seconds, you'll be ready to use the latest RBTools.

Land reviewed changes with one command

The all-new rbt land is the fastest way to take a change (in a local branch or a review request), validate that it's been reviewed, and land it in your repository. It will format the commit message to include the review request's description and testing information, and can even handle pushing the change upstream and deleting the local branch in one go.

(This is currently only available for Git repositories. Support for other repositories will come soon.)

Exclude files from review

Sometimes you'll have modified files that you just don't want up for review. Auto-generated code, for instance. You can now exclude these when posting changes for review by using the new -X option to rbt post, or by setting EXCLUDE_PATTERNS in .reviewboardrc.

Make your own commands with aliases

Ever find yourself repeating a group of options? rbt post -g yes -u HEAD, for instance? In 0.7, you can create an alias -- a new RBTools command, basically -- for those options.

You can even go a step further and make an alias that runs non-RBTools commands. Want to always run unit tests before posting code? Make an alias. How about merging the latest upstream changes into your branch before posting? There's another alias!

See the documentation on aliases for more information.

Faster communication with Review Board

We've sped up RBTools by caching results from your Review Board server. This means lots of operations, such as posting changes, is faster than ever.

If you're using the RBTools Python API to write your own integrations, you'll benefit from this with no additional work on your end.

Supports Team Foundation Server

RBTools now supports posting changes against Microsoft Team Foundation Server. No more hacking together Subversion or Git wrappers for your repository.

This requires the upcoming release of Power Pack for Review Board. If you're interested in beta-testing Team Foundation Server support, let us know.

And lots more!

We haven't even talked about rbt stamp, support for API tokens, or all the bug fixes and other feature improvements.

Check out the release notes for the whole list of changes.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Tonight's release of Review Board 2.0.12 brings about a large number of improvements to stability, performance, Markdown editing and rendering, e-mail control, repository compatibility, extension support, and more. It's one of our largest 2.0 releases yet.

Better Markdown support

We've completely overhauled our Markdown support. You can now disable Markdown when editing a field or a comment, which is useful when pasting or typing text that may not be Markdown-safe. All plain text fields will still be escaped for edit when you begin editing a field, so that you can easily add Markdown content.

We're smarter about how we escape content for Markdown now as well. You'll see fewer backslashes in your text.

If you prefer to edit all your fields in plain text by default, you can now do so by going into My Account -> Settings and unchecking "Always use Markdown for text fields." Any text fields saved as Markdown will still be loaded as Markdown, but now it'll be your choice.

Oh, and if you want to quickly spell check your text fields, just toggle Markdown off for a bit, and you'll get the browser's native spell checking back. You can then toggle Markdown back on when you're done.

The Markdown fields were a bit slow before, especially if the browser was bogged down. We've fixed this, and you should now have a much more comfortable typing experience.

Last, but not least, Markdown rendering is massively improved. We now preserve whitespace, blank lines, wrapping in lists, line breaks in lists, and the starting line numbers for lists. We have smarter language-based syntax highlighting (when using GitHub-style fenced code blocks), and we don't show unwanted backslashes in rendered text.

Better stability

We've fixed over 30 bugs, including issues with multi-threaded server setups, text selection in the diff viewer, CVS keyword processing, Unicode encoding issues with some copy/pasted text in text fields, auto-complete usability, and much more.

A broken extension is now less likely to break Review Board. Much of the custom code in extensions are sandboxed, preventing their errors from breaking anything else.

Support for Kiln and FogBugz

Are you a Kiln or FogBugz user? Good news! You can now review your code on Kiln with Review Board and link to your bugs on FogBugz.

Lots more

This post is already getting pretty long, so check out the release notes for the full list of changes in 2.0.12.