Version 40 Release Date - 20th September 2009
Posted by
rs
on Thu 10 Sep, 2009 12:27:29 +0000
After 4 long months of hacking, the new platform (Version 40) is almost out of beta, and there’s a release date! On Sunday 20th September 2009 XP-Dev.com will be upgraded to the new platform.
During the upgrade, the whole service will be down for 12 hours from 9am London till 9pm London. Sorry for such a long downtime, but it is needed due to the nature of the upgrade and the large amount of data that needs to be transfered between datacentres.
All your project data and repositories will be migrated across, and full details of the release notes will be published as well so that you can get acquainted to the new system easily and reducing the amount of re-learning needed.
Just another polite reminder to the Free users out there — this release will mean that SSL access to your repositories will be turned off on 20th September 2009. You can either upgrade now for the awesome price of $40/year, or you can wait for the new pricing plans to be published. You can upgrade in a few clicks from your settings page
BTW, did I mention that all upgrades are covered by a 30 day money back guarantee ?
If you would like to have a peek at the new platform, just signup for the beta and you should get a beta code soon. The waiting list is about 400 people at the moment, but I am getting through sending out the beta codes pretty fast.
Here’s a very quick summary of what is confirmed to be released. Once the new platform is out, I will post more details on all the new features and goodies.
- Totally new UI
- Faster Subversion commit queue
- Link Tasks, Bugs and Stories with your Subversion changes
- Attachments
- Search
- Burndown and Velocity charts
- Nicer Subversion repository browser
- Direct File Hosting on steroids
Totally new UI
A new platform always needs new make-up and this time it is no different. The new platform is much easier to use and easier on the eyes.
Faster Subversion commit queue
The new platform uses the awesome, sexy messaging platform that is RabbitMQ to manage the commit queue. What this means is that your post commit emails and webhooks will be executed much faster than ever before.
Link Tasks, Bugs and Stories with your Subversion changes
You specify an Artifact ID (a task, bug or story) in your Subversion commit message and the system matches it up to the artifact so that you can browse all the changes that are relevant on the artifact’s web page.
More over, you get to close and even add hours to these artifacts directly from your Subversion commit message.
Attachments
You will be able to attach any files to any of your project items, let it be bugs, stories, tasks, comments, etc.
Pro users will have all their attachments backed-up in real-time. Free users won’t have backups for their file attachments.
Search
All your project data is indexed using Lucene (the great information retrieval library) and very easily searchable.
Burndown and Velocity charts
Visualise how your iterations and projects are progressing and ensure that any slippages are taken care of before its too late.
Nicer Subversion repository browser
The new platform comes with a new, faster Subversion repository browser. Additionally it uses prettify for syntax highlighting and supports highlighting a huge number of languages.
Direct File Hosting on steroids
Direct File Hosting has been used by quite a number of you out there. The new platform adds support for jekyll as a publishing tool so that you can create rich content websites and blogs. Additionally, it will support virtual hosts (CNAME support) so that you can host your own domain/subdomain on XP-Dev.com’s infrastructure (rather than using a *.xpdev-hosted.com domain).
If you’re interested in the new Direct File Hosting with jekyll, you should definitely read Blogging like a Hacker by Tom Preston-Werner.
Comments
One of the major refactoring done was to allow Subversion being just yet-another-source-control on the system. It should allow faster development of getting git and mercurial in.
@dennismi, yes I should have mentioned it a little bit more :) I will be writing some articles on the new features as there are quite a number of them.
But, if you’re curious, here’s how to get the linking working:
Start with creating a bug, task or story. Notice that in the new platform, each task, story and bug has a unique id (a number beginning with a # (hash)).
In this example, I’ll show you a bug that I discovered one month ago and was fixed 2 days ago (markitup’s editor buttons were above suckerfish dropdown menus )
So, bug #66 was created to track this (ignore the red line highlighting below, that was from a screenshot in the bug itself):
When the bug was fixed, I added the comment Closes #66 Adds 0.5h for the commit, and the result was:
The linked commit message
The added hours
In general, the new system will try to find any #<artifact id> that you put in your commit log message, and if you have the words add <some number>h it will try to add <some number> hours to the artifact. So, a commit message that says client wants green background. This should fix #405 partially -- add 1.2h will add 0.5 hours to artifact #405. The add <number>h part is not mandatory, its just reduces the amount of data entry thats needed.
BTW, one final tip — you can just type in #<number> in any text area and if that text area is linked to a project and the artifact #<number> exists, it will automagically link to that artifact, which is uber useful when creating release notes, discussions, user guides, etc.
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mavericck on Thu 10 Sep, 2009
I hoped to see git repos, but it is definitely awesome!!