News

Second beta releases of both the server and the client are available. In the WebIssues Server, the SMTP mailing engine was added which allows sending e-mail notifications using an external SMTP server (for example gmail). Another important improvement is support for the Firebird database (thanks to Alex Bekhtin for sharing his code); it should probably work with InterBase too, although only Firebird 2.1 was tested. Please test those new engines if you can and report any problems.

In the WebIssues Client, support for e-mail notifications was extended with the possibility to enable automatic notifications for modified issues in selected folders. In addition, command line options for overriding default file and directory locations were implemented, allowing to create a USB-portable version of the application (which will be available soon). Finally, handling SSL certificates was improved and a few bugs were fixed.

It was confirmed yesterday that the WebIssues Client is among the winners of the Qt Centre Programming Contest 2008 - the second edition of a contest for open source projects based on the Qt framework. It was given recognition by the jury for being "nice looking, complete and documented".

I'd like to thank the organizers for their effort in bringing the contest to an end despite the difficulties, and obviously the jury members and sponsors. I hope the contest will continue and will become a yearly tradition; the open source community definitely needs such events. Finally I congratulate all other contestants for their great projects; it was a pleasure to compete in such a good company.

I guess this is a good moment to reveal some of my plans regarding WebIssues. Now it's in the middle of the fourth stage of development, besides the e-mail notifications which are work in progress I'm planning to redesign the UI of the WebIssues Client into a single-window model and also create a portable version which could be run from a USB stick. Then I'm planning to start working on web and mobile interfaces which will provide access to the WebIssues server from virtually every location and which will be another great milestone for the project. Everyone who wishes to participate and contribute to WebIssues is more than welcome in order to make it the most powerful open collaboration database.

I'm proud to announce that the first beta releases of both new server and new client are available. This is the first release that introduces new server-side functionality for a very long time, and the first one which includes both new server and client versions.

The focus of this release is e-mail notifications which are sent when new issues are created in selected folders and when selected issues are modified. Users can individually configure notifications using the new user preferences feature. Both the server and the client are fully backward compatible with previous versions, but to use the new features of the server you also need the new client.

In order to enable e-mail notifications on the server, a cron job (or scheduled task on Windows) must be created which periodically executes the cron.php script. In addition, an SMTP server must be available on the server which can be used by the built-in PHP mail function. In the next release, another mailing engine able to connect to an external SMTP will be added. E-mails are created using a simple template engine; two templates for plain-text and HTML e-mails are available; they can also be used to create custom templates.

When notifications are configured on the server, each users can enter an e-mail address and enable notifications in the user preferences (administrators can also modify preferences of all users). Then notifications for individual folders and issues can be enabled or disabled (indicated by a gray square with white 'N' letter).

Another stable release of the WebIssues Client is available. The main features introduced in this release are creating reports and exporting data. Reports containing multiple issues or details of a single issue can be printed directly from the application or exported as HTML and PDF documents. A list of issues can also be exported to a file in CVS format accepted by most spreadsheet and database applications.

Another new feature is support for SSL connections, which allows to connect to the WebIssues server using a secure, encrypted connection. A few possible crashes were fixed in this release. Major code clean up and refactoring was performed, including extracting a few reusable components. Finally, German translation was added and other translations and the user's manual were updated.

The release candidate for version 0.9.3 fixes a build error occurring on some platforms (thanks to hlamer for spotting and fixing it) and also some compilation warnings. In addition I made some code clean-ups and optimizations in a few places. No new functionality was added compared to the last beta version. The final version, which I expect to be released by the end of this month, will contain updated manual and translations; I'm also going to update the website a little bit and immediately start developing the next version of both client and server.