And On It Goes - Yet Another Platform Upgrade

rs — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:36:56 GMT

Plenty of things have changed here at XP-Dev.com. The new platform was released yesterday and except for a few minor bugs here and there, everything went pretty smoothly.

In the next few days I’ll be putting up some posts on the new features that have been released in this current platform upgrade.

For those of you who care about the technical details, this new platform is a complete rewrite from scratch, uses things like Wicket, Hibernate, RabbitMQ, Jetty, Lucene. Currently running Subversion 1.6.5 (latest and greatest at time of writing). Took 4 months, plenty of sleepless nights, but (hell yeah) worth it!

Projects vs Repositories

One thing that has caught a number of you off guard is the new concept of Projects and Repositories and how they’re related to each other.

In the old version, projects were entirely separate from repositories and project/repository owners had to maintain two different list of permissions — one for projects, and another for repositories.

The new platform forces repositories to be linked to a project. Each project can have at most one repository. All the old repositories have been converted into projects of their own. These new projects are named XP-Dev.com Migration: <repository name>. All associated permissions have been applied to this new project as well.

For some of you, it makes sense to move this repository only project to a project that you’ve used for bug/story tracking.

For example, I have a small side project called Media server + frontend and a repository called qmusic on the old platform. I kept all bugs and stories in the project and all source code in the repository.

After the migration, I ended up with 2 projects called Media server + frontend and XP-Dev.com Migration: qmusic. It made sense to move the repository qmusic to the project Media server + frontend. I did this in just a few clicks:

Step 1: Locate your migrated project and edit it

Step 2: Move it to a different project

You can only move it to projects that do not have any repositories.

Step 3: Ensure everything works as expected

Step 4: Set permissions for the project

When a repository is moved between projects, the project permissions are not copied across, you’ll need to add them back to the new project:

Step 5: (Optional): Delete the migrated project

The old migrated project will still be around. If you don’t need it, do remember to delete it from the Settings tab of the project:

What’s Next ?

There’s a long line of features in the pipeline, including the much awaited Git support. I have a vision for XP-Dev.com that will make it one of the coolest collaboration platform out there and will be pushing it towards that goal in the next coming months. No, no one is resting. Not just yet :).

If you’re having any issue with the new release, or just need some help getting yourself around, do just raise a support ticket or head over to the forums

Comment #25910

mark — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:52:19 GMT

Where are the old project settings. like email for commits, public or private, show on the public list or not and so on

Comment #25918

rs — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:54:45 GMT

email for commits, public or private, show on the public list or not and so on

These have been moved to the Source Control tab for each project. If you’re the owner of the project you should see a link called Edit Repository — all the options should be there.

Comment #25944

mark — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:56:08 GMT

thx, found them. must have been blind last time :)

ps: in the blog, i can’t click the xp-dev.com logo on the top left. :(

Comment #25950

rs — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:59:00 GMT

the “XP-Dev.com” words is the the project name that this blog belongs to. There’s a feature in the pipeline that will allow you to style-up and brand-up the project pages and that will include uploading a logo to sit next to the project name. Additionally, that logo will be clickable to anywhere you’d like it to go to.

Comment #26215

Cprouvot — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:31:47 GMT

No problem for me, thx you very much for the upgrade!

Comment #26579

Tom.B. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:45:02 GMT

N.B.: Be careful!!!

After Step 2—Moving the repository to a different project—the project you move it to becomes the currently selected project. So, before deleting the old project (Step 5), be sure to select the old project first.

Comment #26586

rs — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:06:38 GMT

Listen to Tom.B. above :)