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!