We are very excited to announce the release of Review Board 2.0. This is our largest release ever, with lots of new features for end users and administrators, over 70 bugs fixed, usability and performance improvements throughout the product, and significant enhancements to our web API and extension framework.
There's way too much to talk about for this post. We'll simply go over some of the changes we've made to help the day-to-day life of software developers. The release notes will cover the rest.
The diff viewer is more powerful
So much of your time in Review Board is spent looking at diffs. We decided to make that time more pleasant.
We moved to a nicer look-and-feel with better readability, redesigned the revision/interdiff selector, added smarter moved line support and cleaner interdiffs, revamped the file listing (which introduces icons showing the complexity of changes), and introduced all-new indicators for showing indentation-only changes.
Review requests are prettier
The layout of review requests have been improved. The Description and Testing Done have been moved up, with the other fields moved to the right-hand side. This puts the most important information right in front of you, taking up less screen real-estate in the process.
We made it easier to see changes made to a review request. Newly uploaded diffs are shown with their file listings and change complexity icons. Text field changes are shown as unified diffs. Newly uploaded file attachments are shown as thumbnails. Et cetera.
"Ship-It!" is more meaningful
You'll now only see a "Ship-It!" in the Dashboard if all open issues have been addressed. Otherwise, you'll see an open issue count, letting everyone know that there's still work to be done.
If a reviewer opens issues and says "Ship It!" in the same review, the "Ship It!" won't be shown until the last open issue is closed.
Posting changes is easier
We've completely revamped the New Review Request page to make it easier to get changes into Review Board. In particular, it's easy to post existing commits from a branch on your repository without using RBTools, with just a couple clicks.
If you are using RBTools 0.6 or higher, you should find it's even faster to post your changes! There's also a few goodies in 0.6 for posting a commit's ID, and posting in Markdown format. Speaking of...
There's Markdown everywhere!
You can now use Markdown-formatted text in any text box, including the Description/Testing Done fields and in reviews or replies. This is particularly handy if you want to show off code samples, embed images, or list something in bullet point form.
What else...
- Built-in review for text-based file attachments.
- Search is now really easy to set up.
- An all-new My Account page, for selecting groups and updating your profile.
- A better-organized Dashboard, with support for bulk-closing review requests.
- Experimental Web Hooks for closing review requests when pushing related commits.
- High-DPI icons.
- Faster load times with fewer reloads.
- Many, many more improvements.
We didn't even get into the huge number of improvements to the web API and extensions, and all the performance and usability issues we addressed.
We want to thank everyone who helped make this release happen. Our contributors, beta testers, packagers, and of course, all the users and administrators out there who have provided great feedback and ideas over the years.
See the release notes for the full list of what's in 2.0. For any questions or concerns, please reach out to us on our community support list.