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.

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.

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.

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.

As of this morning, you’ll notice a new feature in the SourceForge code browser. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

Clicking on the ‘Download Snapshot’ link will generate a tarball (tar.gz file) of the revision that you’re looking at. This snapshot is generated on the fly, so you’re certain to get the latest cut, but we cache that snapshot so that someone else requesting the same tarball won’t have to wait for it to generate.

If you’re interested, you can see the ticket and some of the implementation details in the ticket tracker, and you can see what else is coming down the road by perusing the upcoming milestones, also in the ticket tracker, and vote for stuff you’d like to see happen a little sooner.