The Bug Genie 4.2 released!

The Bug Genie version 4.2 is now available, with unified theme, project templates and improved user onboarding.

The Bug Genie 4.2 RC2 released!

We pushed a small update to the RC, which enables the project template functionality when creating new projects: https://github.com/thebuggenie/thebuggenie/releases/tag/v4.2-rc2

There are no other changes since RC1.

Please test this release and report back with any issues you find.

The Bug Genie 4.2 RC1 released!

 

 

 

 

We’re happy to announce the first release candidate for version 4.2 – after over a year in development. This release has seen tons of improvements and changes, and substantial testing has already been done.

Planning your moves

The first public beta for The Bug Genie 4 is almost ready to roll. There is a few more items to polish and a little more bugfixing to do – but we’re getting there, one small step at a time.

The last remaining major feature in version 4 is the rewritten planning mode. The planning mode will support agile teams using Scrum or Kanban, as well as a generic mode. This includes planning, reviews and a whiteboard mode, which is quite a lot more than the fairly decent plan mode we have available in version 3.2.

So, without any further delays, let me introduce the brand new plan mode for version 4.0, and a sneak preview of the still unfinished whiteboard.

Composing standards

This post may be fairly technical, but considering the main target of a bug tracking and project management software suite, I think you will all do just fine.

The Bug Genie is an “old” project – when it comes to code, some of the concepts used and when it comes to people. By people I mean old people, like your eccentric grandmother who only brushes her teeth on Wednesdays and smells like rosemary. In a good way of course, The Bug Genie is like that. The codebase for the current release version of The Bug Genie was started at a time before there were established PHP coding standards and best practices. Before Github, Composer and many other frameworks were even available, before PHP 5.3 was released there was The Bug Genie.

What am I getting at? Read on for more details.

An apology and an update

Heya everyone!

This blog post will start out with an apology. The Bug Genie version 3.3 has taken considerably longer to finish than I first imagined. Most of you who follow The Bug Genie are familiar with software development. As is often be the case when you are working on a growing project, areas of the code and the application needs to be improved and added to, in order to both maintain scalability, usability and to add and improve features.

The Bug Genie has been at a stage where a lot of the backend code needed to be refactored and to be improved. There are several things and features with The Bug Genie that are really awesome, but there are also quite a few areas where we simply aren’t doing our best. Notifications, authentication, permissions, file uploads, mobile – these are just to mention a few. In the age of html 5, usability first and “competing” software improving at a rapid pace, The Bug Genie needs to both lead and follow. Lead, by showing that open source issue tracking and project management can look – and be – as good as proprietary alternative. Follow, by not lagging behind in features or usability.

Version 3.3 started out as a medium-sized improvement over 3.2, about the same as 3.2 was over 3.1. There was a time during 3.2 development where using 3.1 was becoming a pain. The improvement in features and functionality in 3.2 was just too much to keep using 3.1, once you’d made the switch. This is where 3.3 has been for several months. Version 3.3 – as an improvement over 3.2 – is more than finished, but it’s not there yet. There are still things that needs to be addressed, improved and changed. I’d like to keep improving and fixing, but at some point you gotta say “dude, release it already”.

3.3 just won’t be all it has been promised to be during the last year of development. Too much time has gone since we started, and too many things have happened to keep our initial targets. But it will be a great improvement over 3.2 – so much, in fact, that I can almost guarantee that you will have no reason or desire to switch back.

Now, for the update. During the last couple of months, the search frontend and backend have seen a complete rewrite with focus on finding issues immediately, instead of old-style “searching”. You’ll see what I mean once you get your hands on the beta. Also, mail notifications have been improved, with the introduction of “notifications”, and a much simpler notification setup for email notifications. In addition to that, a great number of improvements are happening in the backend to improve performance and security for all our users and usecases. In addition to this, the default theme has seen several tweaks and changes to improve readability and usability.

I’ve attached a couple of screenshots of how it currently looks. Keep in mind that some of this may still change, but I think it’s starting to look solid. I hope you like what you see – and if you want to help out with development or testing, feel free to check out the master branch on github.com/thebuggenie – pull requests are highly appreciated.

Until next time!

Introduction to 3.3 – part 3

The 3.3 release is getting closer, as you can probably tell from the activity in the bug tracker and in the git repository. While the 3.3 development version is not ready for public testing yet, it’s time to tell you about another new, cool feature coming in 3.3:

Markdown syntax support!

Introduction to 3.3 – part 2

Hi everyone!

Just a heads up to anyone thinking about trying to start a blog post series just before summer: not a good idea. Anyways, I’m back with another update on new and upcoming features in 3.3. Many of you may not use the wiki, either because of its limited abilities to format and organize content in it, or just because you use another system for documentation or don’t have wiki content to put in. Fair enough, but in 3.3 a huge push has been made to make it possible and desirable for you to put your documentation and text content in the Bug Genie wiki! How so?, I hear you whisper in the shadows – oh, I’ll tell you.

The 3.2 wiki – while staying compatible with the Mediawiki (Wikipedia) syntax – only contains a minor subset of the full syntax available in Mediawiki installations. The goal with using the Mediawiki syntax is both to make it easy to use the Bug Genie wiki for Mediawiki users and authors, and to not introduce yet another wiki formatting syntax for you to learn. The mediawiki syntax is straight-forward, feature-rich and easy to understand. About time we started supporting more of it!

So, what have the wiki got in store for you for 3.3? Read on!

The Bug Genie 3.2 is out!

If you’re not following us on Twitter, Facebook or Google+, you could be excused for not noticing, but we just released the final version 3.2! No more beta, no more release candidate – just the final, real thing.

Get it, here: http://www.thebuggenie.com, and tell us what you think!

The Bug Genie 3.1.8 released!

Just before we’re about to release our highly anticipated 3.2 version, we found time to do a code-wise small, but impact-wise potentially bigger 3.1.x release. We backported a minor cache fix in our DB layer that may significantly increase the speed for many of you. If you’re experiencing delays (not db index related) or slowdowns, please upgrade to this version (it’s a recommended upgrade anyway) to fix this.

Also in this release is a bugfix for #1419 about non-existing linked articles, a minor bugfix for gmp_val() and a fix for the CLI.

Go get it, here: http://thebuggenie.com/download