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New Feature – Forum Stats

We’re pleased to announce a new feature for all discussion forums on SourceForge: a graph of forum post statistics.  Check it out!  Here’s an example of what it looks like on the 7-Zip forums.

Screenshot of Forum Stats

 

Project Data Export

Today we’ve launched a new feature for all SourceForge projects – data export.  The data export provides a zip file of all your project’s metadata, forum, ticket, wiki, and blog content, so you can have a local copy of your own data – for safe keeping, data analysis, custom reporting, etc.  The data for each tool is a JSON file, using the same format as our API for individual tickets, wiki pages, etc.  You can generate an export from the Admin page on your project.  Just choose “Export” from the left menu, check off the tools you want to export, and hit the “Export” button.

Export screenshot

Depending on the size of your project, it may take a few minutes to generate.  You’ll receive an email when it’s done, with instructions on how to securely download it.  If you have private data (e.g. tickets), that will be included, so keep your data safe.

Code repositories and file releases are not included in this backup file.  If you want to back up your code repository, see these SCM rsync backup instructions.  File releases are already mirrored to servers around the globe, but if you’d like to pull down a copy for yourself, see our file management instructions which also covers files on your project web space.

Platform updates

With the platform upgrade process nearing completion, the folks in Engineering are starting to turn their sights back to site improvements, and here are just a few of the things that they’ve done in the last couple of weeks.

Bulk editing of tickets is a way to make a lot of changes very quickly. Unfortunately, if you edited 50 tickets, you’d get 50 email messages telling you what changed. Now, just one message will be sent with a summary of what has changed.

With the upgrade to the latest version of Solr, tool search results (for tickets, wiki pages, forums, blog posts, etc) now shows the date the item was last changed, and has an option to sort by date instead of relevancy. Additionally, search results will have keywords highlighted.

Code snapshots have been changed to zip files, to make them work better for windows users.

Repository names can now contain . and _ and + characters. We did this primarily for projects that are upgrading, but could be useful for anyone.

A while ago we added the ability to collapse multiple tools of the same type (ie, several repositories, or several trackers) into a single menu item which linked to a list of those tools. We’ve now added a drop-down menu of those items as well, to save you some time in navigating to a resource.

Project Upgrades: The day has come

As we mentioned two weeks ago, the final push to upgrade all remaining classic projects starts today. We’ll be starting with the longest-inactive projects, and working towards the present.

If you need to delay the upgrade for any reason, you must notify us immediately, so that we can add you to the delay list.

Platform Updates: members, tags and user search

As I mentioned in the last platform updates post, we’re primarily focused on upgrade-related work lately, but we found time to put in a few enhancements to the platform in the last sprint.

A new macro was added to the wiki syntax. Putting [[members]] in a wiki article will produce a list of all the members of the project. By default, this is limited to 20 members, with a link to a full list if you’ve got more than that. You can link directly to that longer list, if you like. For example, here’s TikiWiki’s full list of developers.

Screen Shot 2013-04-19 at 11.01.19 AM

Next, the interfaces for adding tags to tickets was improved to make it easier to find tags that you’ve already used. Starting to type a tag will produce a dropdown of tags from which to select.

Screen Shot 2013-04-19 at 11.04.26 AM

And, we’ve added a $USER variable that you can use in ticket searches, which will be replaced, at search time, with the currently-active user. For example, if you search for reported_by:$USER, the variable $USER, you’ll get all the tickets reported by the currently logged in user. In this way, you can add a saved search to your ticket tracker so that each user can keep tabs on their own tickets.

So, if you look at the Allura ticket tracker, you’ll see a new “My Tickets” button under “Searches”, which will show you the tickets you’ve opened. (Of course, you’ll have to be logged in for that to work.)

We’re really looking forward to being done with the upgrade process, so that we can focus more on improving the developer experience, and we’d love to hear your feedback on what we should work on next. You can see what’s scheduled for upcoming sprints, and vote on tickets, in the Allura ticket tracker.