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