tl;dr: EvolvisForge 4.8.3+evolvis2 deployed, almost all systems converted; FusionForge 5.0 coming Really Soon Now, faster if YOU help!

I’m happy. I just was able to deploy a new version with many improvements on almost all of our systems (save the two which are not yet on 4.8 but stuck on 4.5 codebase).

For example, Roland has provided code to set the roles’ default permissions in a new forum, tasks or tracker subproject to some (sane) default value, instead of Read — now that they’re suddenly honoured, the bug (of them not being set to e.g. Tech) surprised many people.

I’ve written a CAPTCHA for user self-registration, in the hope of fooling automated login bots to fight spam accounts like we see at evolvis.org quite often these days (maybe spammers have special bot codes for *forge?).

The automated creation of ~user/.forward to enable mail forwarding for «user»@«forge» the same way «user»@users.«forge» is already handled now also works well. Other nifty things include bug fixes and more features in our theme (which should not be considered public) and the mediawiki plugin (allowing better control over importing, editing the Sidebar, logos, etc) and better XHTML/CSS compliance and browser compatibility.

Admins will love this: one can now set the password of any user if one is a Site Admin! (Before, this involved quite some database fiddling after calling md5(1) and encrypt(1) manually.)

The only sad things I see are that we cannot yet upgrade all instances we run to gforge-plugin-mediawiki, so they keep running the old-style separate wikis, which run on the same database though, preventing it from being upgraded from PostgreSQL 8.1 to 8.3 (due to the age of the mediawiki engine being used), and that our internal forge and the public one, evolvis.org, cannot yet be upgraded (especially as I’ll be on vacation RSN).

Still, we hope our cow-orkers enjoy the new release.

On the other track, we’re already running towards a stable 5.0 release, which will rock. One of my colleagues is helping with translating the strings into German upstream, and the branch is created; the code is being stabilised now and short of a release (also, thanks to the speedy help of the Debian FTP masters, with a detailed and correct debian/copyright file and a DFSG free distfile). Some tarent/evolvis extensions have found their way in there already; FusionForge 5.1 will have more, we guess.

Keep up the great work, FusionForge people!

FAQ: When will FusionForge 5.0 be released? ⇒ As soon as it’s ready. Faster if you help.

EvolvisForge will migrate to a 5.0-based code some time after, taking care of possible regressions and merging our changes, some of which will then wander into FusionForge trunk, hopefully ☺