As of yesterday 30 March 2011, web2project v2.3 has hit the street. You can download it from Sourceforge now.

While under development, we didn’t fully realize what all this release would entail. As this development cycle began, we had a perfect storm of events: a holiday break, a particularly motivated project team, a few moments of clarity, and an engaged community. These things gave us significantly more updates for v2.3 than we ever expected.

For this release, a few specific people stood out within an already great community:

• CasN has done an outstanding job in the forums in reporting & debugging issues, helping other users on the forums, and some Add On module work;
• Eureka has submitted great bug reports, the occasional core patch, an updated French translation, and shared quite a bit of work on a number of Add On Modules;
• Opto has contributed detailed and useful bug reports, good patches, and insight on the forums;
• RobertBasic appeared out of nowhere to contribute patches related to better UTF/Unicode handling, translations, character encoding in general, and even a complete rework of the PDF-generation.

As a result of all of this activity, we have a variety of new features, updates, and fixes. While the full v2.3 Release Notes are too long to cover in detail in this post, here are some items I consider particularly useful:

For the Project Managers:

• We further cleaned up the Project List screen – before one of the slowest in the system – and added support for configurable columns. Any core field from a project can now be displayed, formatted properly, and even sorted on.
• We updated the Gantt Charts to ensure that project ordering is consistent and represents the standard waterfall layout.
• We made all milestones in the Gantt Charts color-coded to distinguish upcoming, overdue, and complete.
• We updated all user-specific task pages to include both the Task Priority and the User Priority to make sure everyone has a clear indication of goals, priorities, etc.

For General Users:

• We rewired some of the post-save redirects. Now after saving many types of items – contacts, events, and files – instead of being sent to the list page of that module, you’re redirected to view the item.
• We added a simple “password strength checker” to encourage strong passwords.
• We made major improvements to the Calendar to ensure that private events and tasks are only visible to the proper people, that all events – both recurring and one-time – render in the Day, Week, or Month views appropriately, and that the tooltips have all the necessary information.
• We eliminated upwards of 80% of the XHTML/CSS validation issues. As a result, the system is better behaved in all modern browsers.

For System Admins:

• We added warnings in the Modules and Translations Admin to ensure that you know if any tweaks are necessary.
• We eliminated over a dozen joins to speed performance and reduce memory use.
• We updated many of the underlying libraries including ADODb, PHPMailer, and Xajax.
• We adjusted the system configuration to automatically save known-safe values if they were previously unset.

For Developers:

• We added a the ability to specify “preferred” values in dropdowns to simplify long option lists like Country.
• We removed all references to soon-to-be deprecated classes and added deprecation warnings. If you develop Add On modules, please review your error logs to use the proper classes.
• We refactored most of the controllers into a w2p_Base_Controller class to support Dependency Injection for Unit Testing.
• We added over 50 Unit Tests since the v2.2 release in December.

From here forward, we can focus on the v3.0 release for June. You can review our agenda in the Issue Tracker (select v3.0 in the dropdown), but the top two things on my agenda are finishing the web2project license change and merging in my latest development on Project Budgeting.. more on both of those later.

You can download web2project v2.3 from Sourceforge now.

As of 19 December 2010, web2project v2.2 is officially live. You can download it from SourceForge now.

While in many releases we might focus on cleanup or functionality or developer aspects or similar, this one is a mishmash of a bunch of useful updates on numerous fronts. This isn’t all the updates but a bunch of the important ones:

For the Project Managers:

• We reworked much of the Gantt Chart logic. We’ve added a few icons to better represent the status of tasks and milestones. Further, to make the charts easier to read and understand, we’ve added a legend and shaded alternate lines.
• Gantt Charts are now exportable as single-page PDFs. You can print, email, share, or whatever with just a click.
• We updated Token Tasks – which represent Subprojects – to prevent direct editing. Further, more of the Subproject data synchronizes as expected.
• Dependency Tracking is now ON by default. This provides for better cascading updates as their predecessors move.

For System Admins:

• If System Timezone or System Admin Email are not set, the system provides warning messages with links to the specific fields in the System Admin screens.
• If filesystem permissions are properly configured, the Module screen supports direct uploading.
• The Reports module has a permissions check applied. Previously, it did not.. though the underlying data was filtered appropriately.
• The core system supports configurable pagination for the Project List screen and a few others.

For Developers:

• We replaced our old Javascript library (Mootools) with jQuery. It’s faster, easier to use, and widely supported.
• Added approximately 40 Unit Tests covering areas such as CDate and other classes.
• Added a call in the Calendar Module to display arbitrary date-related information. A reference implementation is coming in the next release.

For General Users:

• We’ve added Czech and Russian translations. If the dice rolls work out, we’ll move to Kamchatka next.
• We’ve set the field focus to the first text box on each screen.
• Private Tasks are now respected on all screens including Gantt Charts.
• We fixed a number of visual issues.

Finally, special thanks goes to community member Opto who consistently submits great bug reports, shares useful patches, and provides random insights that help and speed things along. Thanks!

And that wraps our releases for 2010.

This year we managed 1 Major Release, 3 Minor Releases, and 1 Patch Release. Most of the releases were a week or two later than we wanted but we managed to get all of them out on schedule. More importantly, each and every release has managed to provide new functionality and close bugs while collecting and responding to community feedback.

And in case you missed our recent coverage on SourceForge, check it out!

You can download web2project v2.2 from SourceForge now.

As of 22 September 2010, web2project v2.1 is officially released! You can download it from SourceForge now.

For Project Managers, there are not a huge number of tangible improvements. This was mostly a cleanup release:

• The most important part is that now a User can add Tasklogs for people other than themselves. When you create or edit a Task, you can denote “Allow users to add task logs for others” which allows just that. Users can add hours for anyone currently assigned to work on the Task. The system tracks who logged the time for audit purposes.

For Developers, we had a significant number of cleanups related to timezones, Gantt chart creation, and miscellaneous things here and there:

• The most important part are some cleanups related to the contact_methods refactoring. There were a number of issues that made it into the v2.0 release that are now closed.
• More useful in general was a complete refactoring of the Gantt chart creation. One of our goals for v2.2 is to supplement the current image-based (jpGraph) Gantt charts with both a jQuery and a Flex/Flash-based option.
• We added a significant number of Unit Tests for the system in general but focused on the PEAR/Date and CDate classes specifically. We hope to replace PEAR/Date with core PHP functionality in coming releases.
• We resolved a number of browser compatibility issues for IE 8.
• iCalendar generation has been updated to create VEVENTS that pass validation as per the formal specification.
• We moved a number of duplicate and oddball functions into the deprecation area for refactoring and eventual removal.

For anyone who might be interested, the big time sink during this release was of a legal nature. After the battle between WordPress and the Thesis theme played out and how the GPL could be interpretted, we investigated what it would take to change to a BSD-based license. The good news is that it will be possible – more to follow – and the bad news is the amout of effort involved.

Once again, some great community members stepped up and did a great job in reporting issues, testing fixes, and generally offering insight and sanity checks. Special thanks goes to opto and figgles.

In summary, we closed 38 issues including 3 crash-level issues, 20 minor issues, and 4 features. As always, these are just the formally reported issues and don’t include smaller items that were reported via Twitter, the web2project forums, and other means. If you want to explore everything of interest, check out the web2project v2.1 Release Notes. And of course, if you’re looking for ways to collaborate with us more easily, you should check out our web2project git repository.

You can download web2project v2.1 from SourceForge now.

* And yes, I always wait a few days to announce the releases in case we have to make a patch release.