The first beta for the next big Review Board release is out now. We've just released 1.7 beta 1, which brings with it a number of new and exciting features.
First up is our new extension support. For a long time now, we've been developing a branch with support for loadable extensions that can enhance the features of Review Board. This is finally ready to ship in an experimental form. There's basic documentation on writing an extension, and we'll be working on some sample extensions people can install. As I said, the extension support is experimental, and will likely change and improve over time.
Administrators will see a new administration UI in this version, complete with fancy graphs of what's happening on the server. The administration UI now features an enhanced dashboard with widgets full of various bits of information. New widgets can be provided by extensions (though there's not yet a way to customize which widgets are shown).
Reviewers and developers will better be able to track what issues remain with the new issue summary table. This is a filterable list of issues that have been filed, shown on every review request. You can quickly check what's been opened, discarded, or resolved, and jump to the comment in question. We'll be integrating this more tightly into review request updates in the future.
We have better file attachment previews for certain file types. Right now, this includes text files, which will show snippets of text, and image files, which will show thumbnails.
You can look forward to smaller databases from here on out. Previously, every new upload of a diff would create new copies of each per-file diff, even if it didn't change since the last revision, taking up unnecessary space. No longer! We consolidate these now, reducing the amount of space that's needed. This will only apply to new diffs, though.
For those who have users spread across the world, we now localize dates and times. Users can set their timezone in their My Account page and all dates and times will be based on that timezone.
There are many more changes. You can see the full details in the release notes.
Please note, this is a beta, and not intended for production use. We do recommend testing it and making sure it works for you, though, and we are actively dog-fooding it.
Also, note that Python 2.4 is no longer supported. You will need Python 2.5 or higher. We recommend installing 2.6 or 2.7 to ensure the highest compatibility going forward.
Contact our mailing list if you have any problems, or file bugs for any regressions you find.