We're here today with another beta for Review Board 3.0. This introduces a large number of new features. For instance:
- Highlighting new discussions on a review request
- Ability to revoke Ship-Its
- Open issue verification
- Emoji shortcodes
- CircleCI and Travis CI integration
- OAuth2 Provider support
There's much more, but let's break these features down.
Highlighting New Discussions
Any updates, reviews, or replies made to a review request since you last looked at the page are now highlighted with a blue dot and a blue border, helping you to quickly catch up on what's new.
Revoking Ship-Its
Ever leave a Ship It and regret it? Maybe you realized you missed something important, or it just doesn't apply to the change anymore. Now you don't have to live with the regret. Clicking the "X" on the Ship It able to confirm you want to revoke it, and away it goes.
Open Issue Verification
Open issue tracking is a great way of communicating what changes need to be made before a change can go in, but sometimes an issue is so important that you really need to verify its resolution before it's closed.
Now, when filing the issue, you can mark that it needs verification. This will still allow the review request's owner to click Fixed or Dropped, but it won't be closed until you verify their resolution. You're also free to re-open, if you disagree with their change.
This also works well as a "Don't Ship It" feature. Simply never verify the issue until both sides are in agreement on the direction the change must take.
Emoji Shortcodes
Text fields with Markdown enabled now accept Emoji shortcodes. These are codes like :smile:, :thumbsup:, etc. that will show up as Emojis.
CircleCI and Travis CI Integration
Review Board can now integrate with your CircleCI or Travis CI build systems to perform automated tests when review requests are posted. This is a great way of verifying that code going up for review pass all unit tests, browser-based tests, and anything you have set up.
We're still working on the documentation for these, but the Integrations release notes go into the basics. You can find these integrations in the Administration UI -> Integrations page.
And that's just the beginning
- OAuth2 Provider support
- Easy linking to reviews, comments, and replies
- New visuals and infoboxes in the dashboard
- On-the-fly search indexing
- Dynamics reloading of pending status updates
- Performance improvements
- Lots of new extension functionality for the entries (boxes) on the review request page, better custom field support, and other enhancements.
For the entire list of changes, see the Review Board 3.0 beta 2 release notes and Integrations 0.5 beta 2 release notes.
Installing 3.0 Beta 2
Ready to try beta 2? Excellent. Just run:
$ sudo pip install \
-f https://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/ReviewBoard/3.0/ \
-f https://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/Djblets/0.10/ \
-f https://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/rbintegrations/0.5/ \
--pre -U ReviewBoard
Or, if using easy_install:
$ sudo easy_install \
-f https://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/ReviewBoard/3.0/ \
-f https://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/Djblets/0.10/ \
-f https://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/rbintegrations/0.5/ \
-U ReviewBoard
Make sure you're deploying on a test server with a copy of your database in case anything goes wrong! You can't downgrade.
What's Next?
Now that we're finished with feature development, we'll be focusing on bug fixes and polish. We plan to have one more pre-release (Release Candidate 1) in just a couple weeks, with a final release to follow shortly after. Aiming for early November.
Your feedback will be invaluable to ensure we have a high-quality final release. If you're able to try beta 2, and have anything to report, please reach out to us on the community support forum or our bug tracker.