What's New in Review Board

Hey there, everyone! We have a great release this week for those of you living on the bleeding edge and helping us beta test the next generation of Review Board.

Review Board 2.5 beta 2 is out, bringing new API enhancements, UI polish, better dashboard management, the beginnings of mobile support, and more. This builds on top of all the features we announced for beta 1 back in March.

What you'll notice right away are the changes to the UI. We've been going through the product and working to polish things up, and have been making good progress. You'll see some tweaks to the review request page, file attachment thumbnails, the diff viewer, dashboard, and the New Review Request page.

So let's take a quick look at some of the highlights of the beta.

A dashboard with room to breathe

The new dashboard is a lot less crowded, and a bit more informative. Take a look:

We've also made the dashboard usable on a mobile device. In fact, most of Review Board is now usable, with the rest to follow. Try resizing your screen on our demo server to see how it works.

Tweaks to review requests

The review request page has some general tweaks all over. We've added tab-based navigation, increased the amount of room for the content, and more.

Shiny HD thumbnails

The file attachment thumbnails are now wider, and show more of the thumbnail than before. Hover your mouse over the thumbnail, and it'll scroll to show you even more of the page. If you're on a high-DPI ("Retina" display), your thumbnails will be even more crisp and clear.

A friendlier issue summary table

You'll also notice that we've completely redone the issue summary table, giving it a visual refresh and make it a lot easier to both see what's open and to filter it.

At a glance, you can now see exactly what's left on your plate without reading a bunch of text. To filter by a status, simple click the status. This is far better than the old text-based stats and drop-down lists we had before, don't you think?

Plenty more where that came from

That really just scratches the surface. We didn't even show off the mobile UI, the New Review Request page, or the new format for reviews. That will come in time.

Check out the release notes for everything in this beta.

You can also follow our work over at the Review Board ChangeLog, our new community forum for all things Review Board development.

Installing the beta

If you want to give this release a try, please do so on a test server with a copy of your production database.

To install the beta, run:

$ sudo easy_install \
    -f http://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/ReviewBoard/2.5/ \
    -U ReviewBoard

(Note that pip is not currently supported for beta installs.)

Please give it a try and report any bugs that you find!

Today, Amazon released their all-new CodeCommit service as part of the Amazon Web Services family. CodeCommit is a Git repository hosting service built for scalability and reliability, helping to securely store encrypted versions of your code, binaries, and configuration related to your products and cloud infrastructure.

They've put together a guide on integrating AWS CodeCommit with Review Board that you can follow if you're wanting to give this service a try. It'll walk you through deploying a Review Board server, setting up access to CodeCommit, linking your repository, and posting changes for review.

Currently, setup requires maintaining an in-sync clone of your repository on the Review Board server. We're aiming to work with the CodeCommit team to help bring direct support for hosted CodeCommit repositories to a future release of Review Board and RBCommons.

For more information on getting set up, check out the CodeCommit page and read our guides on configuring Git repositories and our recommended RBTools workflows for Git.

Last week's release of Power Pack 1.3.1 hit some snags with Review Board installs running on Python 2.6.

We've fixed these issues, and things should work smoothly once again. Other than this fix, this release is the same as 1.3.1, meaning that if you're running on Python 2.7, you won't need to upgrade.

Getting Started

If you're new to Power Pack, you can get started by downloading a trial license and following the installation instructions. When your trial expires, you'll be able to keep all your current features for up to 2 people, forever.

If you're already using Power Pack, upgrading is simple:

$ sudo easy_install -U ReviewBoardPowerPack

Once installation completes, reload your web server, and you're good to go!

As always, if you have any questions or bugs to file related to Power Pack, e-mail us.

We have a new release of Power Pack for you today, featuring a number of improvements to the Microsoft Team Foundation Server integration and PDF document review.

I'd like to start with a big thank you to everyone who has worked with us to improve the stability of TFS in the past month, by filing reports and testing builds.

We'll cover the highlights of the release here. You can also check out the full release notes for more details.

Better TFS Support

The big focus of this release is our TFS support. We've made it easier to get started with TFS, simplifying the process for installation, and fixing compatibility issues.

We've worked around a number of TFS file type reporting issues, which led to broken diffs. If you still encounter any broken diffs, let us know, and we'll work with you to fix them.

There's also new support for TFS projects that contain multiple Git repositories. If you have a repository on TFS, it should now just work.

HD Thumbnails for PDFs

Power Pack 1.3.1 brings support for HD thumbnails for PDF files.

HD thumbnails are a new feature in the upcoming Review Board 2.5 release, offering higher-quality, spacious thumbnails that show more of your document at a glance. If you're on a high-DPI/Retina display, these thumbnails will really shine.

Getting Started

If you're new to Power Pack, you can get started by downloading a trial license and following the installation instructions. When your trial expires, you'll be able to keep all your current features for up to 2 people, forever.

If you're already using Power Pack, upgrading is simple:

$ sudo easy_install -U ReviewBoardPowerPack

Once installation completes, reload your web server, and you're good to go!

As always, if you have any questions or bugs to file related to Power Pack, e-mail us.