File Release Notes and Changelog

Release notes for FusionForge 5.1
---------------------------------

FusionForge 5.1 is another incremental step over 5.0, although it's a
large step in some regards, with about 3000 commits since version 5.0.

The FusionForge team would like to dedicate this release to the memory
of Alexandre Neymann, who passed away in March 2011. Alexandre was
one of the founding members of the FusionForge project in 2009, and
one of its most active developers. His death has meant a great loss
to us all.

On the user interface front, the project summary pages and users'
personal pages are now built out of blocks called "widgets" that can
be rearranged at will; these widgets (taken from Codendi) allow
greater flexibility on how the pages look. A new theme, called Funky,
is now available, with a more modern feel (contributed by Capgemini).
In the same field, the old help window has been replaced with a new
unobtrusive tooltip system (Alcatel-Lucent). A less visible aspect is
that the generated webpages are now much closer to full XHTML
compliance.

Among the improvements in features, the document manager has been
vastly rewritten (by Capgemini again), with more features and an
improved usability; more improvements are planned for the next
release, but this should bring the docman to something we're no longer
ashamed of :-)

Many improvements in the trackers have been contributed (by
Alcatel-Lucent), including a progress bar and improvements in sorting.

The permissions system has been enhanced and made more flexible, with
the new ability to have several roles at once in the same project and
to share roles across projects (contributed by Roland Mas as part of
the Coclico project).

New projects can now cloned from one of a set of configurable
templates, thus allowing forges to have standard shapes for their
common project organizations (Roland Mas, Coclico).

New plugins have been written or merged from Codendi as part of the
Coclico project: Mailman, Forumml, Hudson and SoapAdmin. Not all are
production-ready yet, but they're made available for the adventurous.
Other new plugins include a gravatar plugin (Alain Peyrat) and a
"blocks" plugin allowing to add free descriptions in several places
(Alcatel-Lucent).

Behind the scenes, the configuration system has also been made
simpler, it now uses standard *.ini files that are taken into account
immediately; the Apache configuration files are also splitted out into
independent components, rather than a large generated file. (Both by
Roland Mas.)

Another improvement making installation easier is the availability
packages in RPM format for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, in
addition to the *.deb packages for Debian-based distributions.
Installation from source is still supported, of course.

As usual, this release provides scripts to migrate what needs to be
migrated to the new schemes (in this case, for the database schema,
the configuration variables and the existing permissions). Care
should still be taken to check the results of these migrations, as a
safety net.

* Theme: new Funky Theme (Capgemini)
* Docman: new UI (Capgemini)
* Docman: extract documents and directories as zip archive (Capgemini)
* Docman: rebirth of URL and online creation documents (better with
  HTML editor) (Capgemini) 
* Docman: new reservation document feature (Capgemini)
* HTML Editor: available in task PM (Capgemini)
* Trackers: New progress bar to view completion state (when custom
  status field is used) (Alain Peyrat)
* Trackers: Sorting improved to allow text & select fields (Alcatel-Lucent)
* [#127] Patch to auto approve projects.
* scmgit plugin now allows project members to request a personal git
  repository as a clone of the current project's one (AdaCore)
* New blocks plugin, to add free HTML blocks on top of each tools of
  the project allowing admins to add free descriptions
  (Alcatel-Lucent), (better with fckeditor plugin).
* New unobtrusive tooltip system based on jquery and tipsy to replace
  old help window (Alcatel-Lucent)
* New gravatar plugin to display faces of users using the Gravatar
  service (Alain Peyrat)
* More flexible and more powerful role-based access control system
  (Roland Mas, Coclico)
* Unified configuration system, now using standard *.ini files (Roland
  Mas)
* Template projects: there can be several of them, and users
  registering new projects can pick which template to clone from for
  their new projects (Roland Mas, Coclico)
* Reorganised, modular Apache configuration (Roland Mas)
* New User Widget : documents monitoring (Capgemini)
* RPM packages for Red Hat (and derived) distributions
* New extratabs iframe option to allow embeding another site using an
  iframe (Alcatel-Lucent)
* Improved Spanish translation (Libresoft)