[Mantisbt-announce] Mantis 0.18.0a1 released (Alpha release)

[Jeroen L. <jl...@ca...>]

So, finally it arrives!

The Mantis team is happy to announce the release of version 0.18.0a1.

This is an alpha release, which means we consider it essentially feature 
complete but are aware of bugs that still need to be fixed and 
optimizations that still need to be made.  We decided to make an alpha 
release now rather than waiting a few weeks so that we could begin to have 
a wider audience of testers.  In particular we need to see how our 
installation and upgrade procedures are working so we can update the 
documentation.

If you have the time and inclination we would love to have you help us test 
the hundreds of new features in this release.  Remember, though, that this 
is alpha-quality code and we don't recommend deploying it in a production 
system.  We recommend making a copy of your database, making a second 
installation of the new Mantis, and testing the upgrade process on your copy.

If (or should I say when) you find bugs, please file an issue at 
http://mantisbt.sourceforge.net/mantis/ and if you have suggestions, you 
can join the developers mailing list (more info at 
http://mantisbt.sourceforge.net/mailinglists.php3 ). Due to Sourceforge's 
new email policy, you cannot create new accounts in the issue tracker at 
the moment.  We are working to resolve the problem, but until we do you can 
use the username/password reporter/reporter to file issues.

If you speak any language other than English, please take a look at the 
files in the lang directory. There have been lots of new strings added and 
few languages are still completely up to date. You can send patches to the 
language files to the developers mailinglist.


------------
REQUIREMENTS
------------
* a web server running PHP 4.0.6 or higher
* MySQL 3.23.2 or higher (and PHP mysql support of course)


------------------
RELEASE HIGHLIGHTS
------------------

This marks the first release of Mantis with a completely refactored API 
library.  All the API files are in the core/ directory should you wish to 
examine them in more detail.  The process of cleaning up the APIs and 
making sure all the pages use them is still not quite complete, but we are 
getting close

This release also contains major improvements to security.  Pages should be 
much clearer about the access levels required to use their features and you 
should not be able to bypass security by modifying URLs.  Also, we have 
removed our dependency on the PHP register_globals feature, so you can now 
safely disable (either globally if possible or in your Mantis directory).

Make sure to look in the admin/ section when you have done your 
installation.  There is a script that will check your installation for 
obvious problems and a section that will upgrade your database schema from 
an old version of mantis to the newest.  There was a problem in older 
versions of mantis that escaped data twice before putting it into the 
database.  Unless you have some specific reason, you should make sure to 
run the string escaping upgrades as well.

Finally, we've added a lot of configuration options and removed constants 
from the code whenever possible so you should be able to customize Mantis 
to behave exactly the way you want.  Look in config_defaults_inc.php, 
doc/configuration.html (not yet fully up to date), and 
doc/CUSTOMIZATION.  Be warned that we will likely rename a lot of these 
variables before we release 0.18 final.

The package can be found at 
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=14963&release_id=140667