What's New in Review Board

We have two exciting announcements for you today!

Review Board 2.0.3

The first, which you've already guessed, is a brand-new Review Board release. In 2.0.3, you'll find a number of long-requested bug fixes, and some new features.

The highlights include:

• Empty files can now be posted for review.
• Users can now log in with their e-mail addresses instead of their usernames.
• Long, unbreakable lines in the diff viewer now wrap properly in all cases.
• GitLab v6.8+ servers with over 100 repositories now work.
• Far more useful sample crontab files, which are now auto-generated when upgrading your site.
• Counters in the dashboard should finally be fixed!
• Interdiffs are more reliable.
• Lots of Unicode-related bug fixes for diffs and Subversion have been squashed.

All-in-all, there are 23 bugs fixed in this release, and a few more new features we didn't even mention.

See the release notes for the full details.

Oh, and it also links to the new Package Store. And that brings us to:

The Review Board Package Store!

Today, we're happy to introduce the all-new Review Board Package Store, the new home for extensions and software that work with Review Board.

Administrators and end-users can browse the store for software to see what's out there to improve their Review Board experience.

Developers can post what they've made, show it off with screenshots, and let users know what's new with new release announcements.

The store is brand new, so we only have a few things up there right now. If you're a developer writing software that integrates with Review Board on any level, we'd like to encourage you to add it to the store.

We welcome any feedback on the new store. Bug reports, category suggestions, new features, or anything else that would make your life easier.

As many of you are undoubtedly aware, there is a piece of legislation named SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) in the United States that is undergoing much criticism and debate. In its current form, it has the potential to do much damage to the Internet as we know it, and it has a long list of companies and open source projects that are against it. We are one of them.

You may also be aware that GoDaddy, a domain registrar famous for using scantily clad women to advertise domain name purchases, was not only backing SOPA but actively helped draft bits of it. As a result, many tech companies and projects are moving away from GoDaddy as part of a "Move Your Domain Day" this December 29th. Again, we are one of them.

We don't anticipate much downtime, but if you find you have trouble reaching this site, please be patient. It may take time for the DNS records to update, and with the mass exodus away from GoDaddy, there may be other unexpected delays. We should be moved over shortly.

Traditionally, our documentation hasn't been as in-depth and fleshed out as our users and ourselves would have wanted. We've used our Wiki to store various small pieces of documentation, and while better than nothing, too many people were still getting stuck.

I'm pleased to announce that we've fully rewritten our documentation and made it available directly on our website. There's a new Users Guide, Administration Guide, FAQ, and the beginnings of Code Base Documentation.

There's still more planned for the documentation. The goal is to prevent it from getting stale, and to update it any time something related updates in Review Board. Over time we'll add more details on various pieces of Review Board, allow users to give feedback on pages, and more.

We've tried to make sure to address everything that the old documentation addressed, but please file a bug if something is missing or confusing.

Back in the early days of Review Board, just before we were set to announce, I threw together a little website for the project. We were small then, with just a few users (no companies outside VMware, really), and the website didn't need to have much.

We've grown considerably since then, and the website was starting to feel really stuffy and outdated. It also wasn't built to handle some of the things we have planned for it, such as a documentation browser in the site or community features for third party developers and users. So, I decided it was time to give the site a makeover.

The new site is a lot cleaner and leaves room to breathe. There's still more planned for the site, and there's probably a few breakages here and there, but it's a definite improvement over the old one.

In the next week, I hope to begin bringing new parts of the site online. We also have a 1.0 alpha 2 release planned.

If you find any breakages, please let us know.

In the past, we've always brought information on new Review Board development to our blogs and the mailing list. However, as the software continues to mature, we need a better way of informing people about major releases and important updates, without making them sift through development discussions and technical updates.

In the future, we'll be posting critical updates (such as required database migrations) here, as well as software releases (once we hit 1.0). News posts will soon begin to appear in your Review Board administration dashboard, making it easy to keep up. And, of course, you can subscribe to our RSS feed in your favorite news reader.