What's New in Review Board

Review Board 2.0.19 is out! This release focuses on some e-mail-related improvements and a series of compatibility/bug fixes.

Extension authors have access to several new hooks that allow extensions to better control the recipients for an e-mail list. They can be used to filter out addresses or add to the To/CC lists.

On the user side, e-mails now provide a bunch of new headers that you can use for more fine-grained filtering:

• Any review e-mail with a Ship It! will contain a X-ReviewBoard-ShipIt: 1 header.
• If it doesn't have any other contents, it'll be accompanied by a X-ReviewBoard-ShipIt-Only: 1 header.
• You'll find a X-ReviewBoard-Diff-For header for every file in a diff, to really help sort those into appropriate right e-mail folders.

It wouldn't be a .z release without some good bug fixes:

• We've fixed more character set compatibility issues with different systems we integrate with.
• Some issues relating to Power Pack compatibility on Windows and with SSH scalability have been resolved.
• Comment dialogs no longer show the wrong thing if immediately opening a newly-saved plain text comment.
• Opening and closing text fields or the comment dialog no longer results in unnecessary drafts being created.

The full list of changes are up in the release notes.

Please note that you're also going to want to upgrade your version of Django to 1.6.11.1. We cannot install this version for you at this time, so see our earlier announcement for instructions.

We've just put out new, unofficial releases of Django 1.6.11 that contain security fixes backported from the latest versions of Django.

The Django project is no longer maintaining Django 1.6.x, as it has end-of-lifed. However, for many reasons, we're currently dependent on this version. As such, we will be maintaining security releases for Django 1.6.x from here on out, in the form of 1.6.11.x releases.

The latest security releases can always be download here. We will announce new releases on our Official Announcements mailing list and on our community support forum.

To upgrade to Django 1.6.11.1, you can run:

$ sudo easy_install \
    -f http://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/Django/1.6/ \
    Django==1.6.11.1

or, using pip:

$ sudo pip install \
    -f https://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/Django/1.6/index.html \
    Django==1.6.11.1

Unfortunately, due to restrictions in the design of pip, we will not be able to automatically upgrade to these versions of Django in our upcoming releases of Review Board. It will be up to you to handle this for now. We will announce instructions along with the releases.

For information on what's in this security release, see Django's announcement.

Please note that Django 1.6.x is the last version to support Python 2.6.x, which has also end-of-lifed. We will be dropping support for Python 2.6 in Review Board 2.6, so we recommend moving to Python 2.7 at your earliest convenience.

Many of you may have heard that Google Code is going read-only starting tomorrow, and some have asked us how this will affect the project, since we host our bug tracker there.

Not to worry. Google's been nice enough to whitelist us for a little while, so even though most of Google Code will be down, we'll continue to be up. This is not permanent, but for the time-being, you'll still be able to report bugs at the old address.

Going forward, we'll be migrating off of Google Code and onto a new tracker. That will happen in the coming weeks, and we'll talk more about it when it happens.

So why the delay? Why did Google need to extend the shutdown date for us? We actually have something new on the way that we're pretty excited about. We call it Splat, and while still very young, it's shaping up to a pretty cool bug/issue tracker. We weren't quite prepared to switch over to it by the shutdown date, but we have enough of it ready to launch pretty soon.

There's a lot more that I'd like to say about Splat, but there will be time for that. We'll make a more formal announcement soon.

We're in the home stretch for the big release of Review Board 2.5. Today's release candidate is, we hope, the last release before 2.5 goes live, so if you've been waiting for a good opportunity to jump in and test it out, now's the time!

This release primarily focuses on bug fixes, with a few new extension and Markdown improvements that came along for the ride. Some of the extension features (namely, new hooks that control some e-mail behavior) and fixes are ported over from the upcoming 2.0.19 release, so those of you staying on 2.0.x will be getting those soon.

Markdown input has gotten more stylish. Fenced code blocks, used to format blocks of code, will now syntax-highlight that code, just like the diff viewer. This supports 14 major languages, including CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, C/C++, Go, and PHP.

The login, registration, and password reset pages are now mobile-friendly, helping you to get going quickly on your mobile devices. Once you're in, you'll find some improvements to the dashboard and user pages to help you filter for the review requests you want to find.

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

Once again, barring any major problems, we will be releasing the final 2.5 soon. That means if you're planning an upgrade soon, you should really give RC 1 a test to make sure the final 2.5 will work for you.

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/RC installs.)

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