What's New in Review Board

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Review Board 2.5. You’ve helped make Review Board a hugely popular tool, with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, and we think you’re going to love 2.5!

We really pushed ourselves to improve the tool’s extensibility, to give you even more ways to make Review Board a reliable, hassle-free part of your workflow. We’ve incorporated feedback from our users around things like mobile support, improved collaboration capabilities and usability improvements that make developers’ jobs easier.

Here are some of the highlights:

Productivity Boosters

• A cleaner, more polished look and feel

  A cleaner Review Board is a friendlier Review Board. We've removed a lot of the noise and cruft, and helped bring your attention to what matters most.

• Work on the go with new mobile support

  On a train? Out to lunch? No problem! Review Board 2.5 is mobile-friendly, so developers can contribute to reviews while away from their desk.

• Review faster with Expandable Diff Fragments

  Instantly see more context for a comment. One click expands the diff right in the review.

• Stay focused by muting and archiving review requests

  For all the Inbox Zero types, you can now archive old review requests and mute any that don’t require your attention.

• Auto-version and diff your file attachments

  Just upload a new version of an attachment and Review Board will track its version, letting everyone see all the changes made. Images and text-based attachments can even be diffed!

• See more at a glance with Live HD Thumbnails

  Hover over file attachment thumbnails and watch as more of it scrolls into view, giving you a better picture of what's in the file.

Integrations to Power Your Workflow

• Share your credentials securely with API Tokens

  Third-party tools/services and custom scripts can now securely log in as a Review Board user. No need to give out passwords, and the access can be tightly restricted. This paves the way for future integrations with things like third-party automated code review services.

• Hook into other services with Webhooks

  Review Board 2.5 can notify other services, such as collaboration and CI tools, in a format they understand when posting or updating review requests and reviews.

• Deeper integration with bug trackers

  Connecting your JIRA, Bugzilla, or GitHub bug trackers to Review Board lets you see more detail about the bugs on your review requests.

You can see some of this in action by watching the video below:

For the entire list of changes, see the release notes.

Tell Your Friends!

We hope you're as excited about 2.5 as we are! Want to help us spread the word over Twitter or Facebook? We've even prepared a little something you can start with:

Looking forward to using @ReviewBoard 2.5’s new UI, mobile support, webhooks, and more! http://bit.ly/1MUZPv2 #devops

You can also find the announcement on Hacker News and Reddit.

Some Thoughts From Our Beta Users

"As both a heavy Review Board user and a contributor, I’m very excited about release 2.5," said Stephen Gallagher of the Fedora Project. "The Beanbag team and entire Review Board upstream open source project exemplify all the ideals of the open source movement: agility, collaboration and community. The interface improvements in 2.5 really make Review Board feel like a tool for today’s developer. And as I’m increasingly away from my desk, mobile support to keep up with reviews on the go is critical."

Griffin Myers, a developer with a leading maker of high performance signal processing applications, added "Review Board is an indispensable part of our development process. It helps increase collaboration within our team, improves code quality, and provides a pathway for new team members to become assimilated with a large existing code base. The Beanbag team has cultivated an active user community and is incredibly responsive to, and receptive of, user feedback. I’m most excited about 2.5’s restyled UI, improved mobile support, and expandable diff fragments. We also love the enhancements to Markdown rendering, e-mail and dashboard management, all of which have their roots in user requests."

RBTools 0.7.5 is now out and ready to install.

This is largely a bug fix release, focusing in part on improved compatibility with Windows, Git, Subversion, Mercurial, Perforce, and Team Foundation Server.

On Windows, RBTools will now first look in %HOME% to find any custom .reviewboardrc files, instead of only looking in the Application Data directory, which will be quite helpful with many system configurations. There are also fixes for using Mercurial on Windows.

Non-Git user? You've probably seen that annoying but harmless command not found: git error when posting a change. That's gone now!

For Perforce users, posting submitted changes or files outside of the client view now work. This had regressed in an earlier release, but you should be in good shape now.

Subversion has seen some more Unicode fixes, plus fixes for rbt post --svn-show-copies-as-adds.

Along with all this, we've added a new feature for setting a custom search path for .reviewboardrc. You can set your $RBTOOLS_CONFIG_PATH to a list of paths to search, allowing you to make your version in $HOME take precedence over what's in your repository, and allowing you to work with centralized collections of aliases in your organization.

See the release notes for the complete list of changes.

One more thing: We've simplified installation for those of you using pip to install. Our builds are now directly hosted on PyPI, meaning all you now need to do to upgrade is run:

$ pip install -U RBTools

Power Pack 1.3.4 builds on top of last release's 1.3.3, fixing a couple of annoying bugs.

First, some of you have found that Reports broke in 1.3.3. We've tracked the issue down and fixed it. Reports should work just fine now.

Beta users of Review Board 2.5 have noted that one of our new features didn't work so well with Power Pack. Review Board 2.5 allows any draft comments on an image or document to be moved and resized, but this didn't play nicely on PDFs. That's been taken care of, so once you upgrade to 2.5, you'll be able to drag those comments all over the place.

It's a small release, but we have some big ones coming up, as we prepare some major improvements to Reports, and introduce some new features to help manage user accounts.

See the release notes.

To install Power Pack, follow our installation instructions. If it's already installed, you can upgrade by typing:

$ sudo easy_install -U ReviewBoardPowerPack

Got a feature you want in Power Pack? Let us know!

Power Pack 1.3.3 is now available for download, featuring new bug fixes and an improved setup and trial experience.

Power Pack extends Review Board, offering PDF document review, report generation, scalability, and compatibility with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and GitHub Enterprise.

We've fixed case sensitivity issues when comparing paths with TFS, fixing issues when posting diffs. There are also compatibility fixes for systems using Python 2.6.

Along with this, we've made it easier to get started with Power Pack. When you first install it and enable the extension, you'll see a new banner guiding you through installing a trial license, and then guiding you through adding users to the license. Once your trial runs out, it'll let you and your users know, so that there's no confusion as to why features stopped working.

See the release notes for all the changes.

To install Power Pack, follow our installation instructions. If it's already installed, you can upgrade by typing:

$ sudo easy_install -U ReviewBoardPowerPack