Libreplan 1.2 has been released!

After some months of hard work we are proud to announce that LibrePlan 1.2.0 is finally here. We invite you to discover what is new in this version and to enjoy the new project website.

In the 1.2.0 version the project has been renamed to LibrePlan and this will be the official name for the project from now on. With the new name, decided by the community, we are remarking that LibrePlan is a generic purpose planning tool, suitable to many sectors.

Besides, with this new version, the project has a new image and a revamped website.

This new major version comes with important new features apart from all the bugfixing done since the 1.1 major release. Among the new features, these are the most relevant ones:
Migration to ZK 5 Community Edition.

LibrePlan uses ZK framework as UI toolkit and in this release has been migrated the interface from ZK 3.6 to ZK 5.0.

ZK 5 was incompatible with version version 3.6 and this movement have implied:

Reimplementing LibrePlan custom UI widgets in ZK 5.0 architecture
Providing an implementation in ZK 5.0 for widgets in 3.6 version which changed their license and which are not open source anymore.
Reviewing all the application windows and to do small configuration and formatting changes.

This allows us to get advantage of the latest innovations in rich web interfaces and enjoy both the performance and architectural enhancements of this new ZK version.

Resource allocation engine enhancements.

The planner engine has been improved with three new functionalities:

Task movements in Gantt view keeps the configured allocation function. Before this, if you configured a stretches function or sigmoid function in a resource allocation and the task was moved because a dependency or constraint set by the user, the allocation function applied in the new point was the flat function. Now, the configured stretches or sigmoid function is used.

Manual allocation automatic detection in advanced allocation. Now if the user changes the allocation of a task in advanced allocation window, the type of allocation is automatically tracked as manual.

Manual allocation locking support in Gantt view. So far if a task had a manual allocation and was moved in the Gantt, the custom allocation was lost and a flat function was applied. In this version, a keep manual allocation strategy has been implemented. It consists of disabling the automatic movement of those allocated tasks in the Gantt by being configured with a START IN FIXED DATE constraint after the manual allocation. If the user wants to move these tasks, he has to change in first place the allocation function used and, in second place, has to remove the constraint. In this way, the manual allocation configured is not lost by accident.

Sharing state between perspectives.

The project planning in LibrePlan is achieved by using several perspectives:

Project scheduling (Gantt).
Project details (WBS).
Resource load
Advanced allocation.

Until this version, the user had to save before abandoning a perspective to avoid losing the changes on going to another. To improve this, in this release, the planning data has been shared among all the project perspectives and on saving in one of them, all the planning data is stored.

This a more natural way of creating the project plan. Now the user can move freely among the project views configuring different things and, on reaching a desired state, he can ask to persist changes. Besides, with this new feature, the loss of changes by accident is prevented on a perspective change without saving first.
LDAP authentication and authorization module.

In this version the possibility of using LDAP as backend for users has been implemented.

An LDAP authentication and authorization module has been developed. With this, it is possible to use the users configured in the company directory without the need to create them in LibrePlan manually.

The main features of this module are:

User passwords saving in LibrePlan database after right authentication option. This allows the LDAP users enter the application if the LDAP is off-line.
Role matching support. It is possible to map LDAP roles to LibrePlan permissions. Two strategies are provided: Group strategy (all the users under a node) and property strategy (property of the node user with all the role values).

My account area

It has been developed a new top level menu entry called *My account* with several options with a per user scope. This means that they are operations that concern only to the connected user which is configuring them. The operations included in this zone are:

Personal data. User can manage his contact information.
Application preferences. User can select the language of the application and if if the load charts of the planning windows appear folded or unfolded by default.
Password administration. User can change his own password.

Functional tests.

One of the maxims of LibrePlan is to create a project with good quality. For this reason in this version functional tests to the project have been incorporated into the project.

Functional tests are black-box tests in which the interface of the program is tested. The tool which has been chosen is Sahi and it allows verifying that all functionalities keep working successfully. An initial set of Sahi tests have been developed and they will be increased as time passes.
Other minor tasks implemented:

Internationalization. Some strings were not being translated accordingly to the language used under certain conditions.
Default login auto-completion is now configurable, you can disable it from the configuration window.
Now when editing contents, information identifying the element being edited is always displayed on the page heading.
Work reports minute detail level support has been added. This allows users to specify how many hours and minutes they have devoted to each task. Reports have been updated accordingly to include the work time in minutes too.
LibrePlan web services have now a new method to export only one entity by specifying its code.
Russian and Portuguese translations. Apart from English, Spanish and Galician now LibrePlan is also available in Russian and Portuguese.

You are invited to download LibrePlan 1.2, test it in the on-line demo, read more information about it in the development wiki. Do not hesitate to contact us if you any question or you need further information.