In recent weeks and months we have experienced an issue whereby the web projects become unresponsive - basically unable to serve your requests. During this time we have kept a very close watch to make sure we get it back online as soon as possible. Still, we know that some of you no doubt have been inconvenienced by these short downtimes.

The good news is: We have discovered and fixed the cause of the issue.

A bug in [[TOC]] wiki macro only appeared when requests where made to a page in a project that used the macro, and such a project would then permanently claim one database connection. It 'infected' a project on first view, but it did not get worse by itself. However, at random intervals pages with the macro was requested on other projects tying up new connections until at some point no further database connections could be established.

(Those that are technically inclined can read about the issue and see my fix at http://trac-hacks.org/changeset/4366)

Finding this bug has taken much longer than we had imagined. However, it has led us to review all the central parts of the code, and fixing and reworking some parts that were not optimal. Additionally, we have updated all server software to the latest and greatest versions. The service is now in very good shape.

We can only apologize, and thank you all for being patient with us trough this period.

We now have backups... Just joking - we have of course done central backups every day since doors opened back in 2006.

The big news is that if you are a project administrator, you can generate and download full backups of the web project yourself:

The new Backups Admin page is available for all regular projects, and it also has pointers to Subversion syncronisation (svnsync) and WebDAV file share access.

Together this means that every single byte of data, history and settings related to your project is available to you whenever you want it.

Enjoy!

As all projects include a WebDAV-based file share for non-repository files, we have of course also made a 'Help' page with information on how to connect. It turns out that the how-to section for 'Windows' was XP-only. Vista does this differently, and a plain Vista install even needs a fix to get it working.

We have just updated the Help page with a new 'Vista' section - look it up inside your project Help (HelpUsers/Files) to get started with WebDAV on Vista.

There seems to have been an e-mail delay today with our ISP (Broadnet.no).

We have contacted them, and the have confirmed that the there was in fact a problem, and that the problem should now be corrected. However, they warned that some further delays can still be expected as the e-mail servers catch up on the backlog of outgoing e-mails during the coming hours.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and please contact us if the delay persists longer than can be reasonably tolerated!

We have just renewed our SSL certificate, and the new certificate is operational as of now.

Depending on your browser, Subversion client, feed reader or other client accessing CodeResort services, you may receive a message along the lines of:

Error validating server certificate for 'https://www.coderesort.com:443':
 - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
   fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
Certificate information:
 - Hostname: *.coderesort.com
 - Valid: from Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:40:45 GMT until Mon, 04 Jul 2011 09:40:45 GMT
 - Issuer: Equifax Secure Inc., US
 - Fingerprint: 5a:d9:93:3e:a5:66:12:ea:8f:44:fe:04:41:f4:5c:b9:42:9e:6d:b2
(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently?

Please accept the new certificate permanently, and everything should work as normal.

If you use 'Browse Source' in projects regularly, you may be interested to know that you can use the keyboard to navigate.

Use:

• 'J' to move down.
• 'K' to move up.
• 'O' or hit 'Return' to open and close folders, and to open files for reading.

Just ran some statistics and noticed that we recently passed 20.000 Subversion changesets committed to the various projects.

Hurrah!

To make CodeResort even easier to use, we have today enabled a WYSIWYG-editor for all projects.

The editor is optional, allowing you to switch between viewing modes using the wysiwyg/textarea radio buttons that will now be available on all input textareas on the site:

Ain't that nice?

Using the editor should be mostly self-explanatory - try out the buttons with or without selected text and see what happens.

This week we have made some changes to how user registration and applications for project membership works.

As before, the minimum required to create a login is a valid e-mail address. However, very often the needs of project owners extend beyond that in order to evaluate and grant permission, and to get in touch with project members if needed.

Based on this we have made a setting in a new 'Memberships' admin page:

The setting is optional for each project, and what is needed will be clearly stated on the application form. When granted access to such a project, your basic profile information (name, company and contact details) will be available to the owners of that project.

We have made a number of improvements to the registration and application forms when implementing this, and hopefully getting access to projects will be even easier than before.

Many of you (if not all of you) have relations to other systems while developing and maintaining your CodeResort project. Tickets, Wiki pages, Subversion log messages and so on fills up with full links to external systems.

It may be that you use some other bug tracker, or perhaps reference pages on test or production systems that showcase a bug. It could be anything. What makes these links a bit difficult is that they often are:

• Difficult to read and reference
• Don't get updated when a system moves from one address to another
• Not pretty

InterWiki makes it possible to build your own link syntax. In the same way you can link to a wiki:WikiStart (wiki page) or ticket:42 (ticket), you can now make a link that looks and behaves just as you need it.

Say for instance that you have a test and production setup and your project also deals with bugs on pages and content planning. If the content pages are numbered, how about referencing them as prod:525 or test:233?

If you use some other bug tracker with your project, how about just typing bug:123 and have a full external link rendered?

Or, if your project uses modules from another project, such as the epicode project that you need to reference, how about typing epicode:ticket:42 to make a link? Even display this link as descriptive text by using this pattern: [epicode:ticket:42 related issue]

Want to know how? Read up on the HelpUser/InterWiki help page - you'll find all you need to get started.

Thought I'd drop a note on yet another new feature that is easy to miss - a very useful feature for anyone using the Ticket system.

Projects contain two types of ticket listings. The listed Reports used to be SQL only. Anyone looked at the SQL or tried to modify or make new SQL-based reports? Not as easy as anyone would have liked.

Custom Query on the other hand is great for picking the criteria of the selection, selecting grouping, ordering and also what columns you would like to display. However, unless you set them up as [query:] links or inline using the [[TicketQuery]] macro, they were temporary.

No longer. This button is now available on Custom Query pages:

Saving a query as a report makes it appear on the 'View Tickets' front page, and allows you to link to it using the report syntax: {10} or report:10

Much nicer don't you think?

One of the recently available features is the ability to annotate the source code - most commonly called 'blame' support due to it's popular use of finding out who (and when) and error was introduced...

When browsing a source file, there is now a new 'Annotate' option:

Selecting it will render the changesets for each line, and the tooltip will provide some basic information - selecting the changeset will take you directly to it:

Ain't that nice?

Here is a tip for quickly navigating to a resource when you know its name. Just enter it as a link in the 'Search Project' field.

Here are some examples for you to try in your own project:

• #42 - ticket number 1
• [42] - for changeset 42
• {3} - for report number 3
• RecentChanges - for wiki page of that name

Pretty much all resources in your project is directly linkable - have a look at the HelpUser/Links help page to see the possibilities and review syntax.

Every project on CodeResort now has a Blog:

• Regular projects (/p/projectname) have a project-internal blog, available to project members only.
• User projects (/u/username) have a public blog for anonymous access - open to the world.

Blog for regular projects

The Blog is enabled by default for all projects, but only project administrators will actually see it due to their extended permissions. To let other in you need to set permissions. A typical setup based on our default permission setup is:

• Grant BLOG_MODIFY_OWN to members ('@member' group) so they can view all the news, post their own news, but not modify the news of others.
• Also, grant them BLOG_COMMENT permission so that the project members can comment on blog posts.

Why a project blog? Our motivation for this feature was to find a nice and simple way to bring any kind of 'news' into the project information - and documentation. It fills a much needed gap for information that does not fit nicely into either wiki, tickets, or changeset messages. We can't tell you how you should use it, but here are some ideas for inspiration:

• News on project organisation, introducing new project members or new responsibilities.
• Project deliveries such as releases / deployments and changeovers, announcing branches and the like.
• Pulling together a number of tickets, changesets and wiki updates into a coherent overview of what has actually happened and why.
• Notes on changes to developer setups, dependencies or similar information needed for people to do their work.

The blog has its own RSS feed for full-length messages, and it also puts all creations, edits and comments into the Timeline. Note that if you already have a Timeline RSS feed set up, you need to grab the URL again to get the blog events (blog=on needs to be added to the query string).

Try it out, and see what it can do for you and your project.

Blog for user projects

Having the blog feature available, we thought it would be a great idea for any user with their own project to also have a blog to share their findings and thoughts with others. The user project blog is all pre-configured and ready, so just get started posting.

Note: If you have a login but no user project, you basically only need to click 'Create Profile' in the top navigation menu. Fill in the form, and your own personal mini-project is created. Currently a 'user project' has the following main features:

• A Wiki, only available for you.
• 'My Tickets' - your own overview of all open tickets in all projects on CodeResort where you are somehow involved.
• The Blog that is available to the world.

If you do start using your personal blog, let us know so that we can add a link to your blog in the sidebar here.

More Information

We've also added a help page with further information about the blog - see 'Help' form inside your project, or read the wiki page here if you are logged in: HelpUser/Blog

Open Source

Lastly, just a note to say that the blog feature is made available as open source - developed and maintained by CodeResort: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/FullBlogPlugin

This is done to ensure that whatever data you enter into your project here at CodeResort, will also be available and accessible if you for some reason should want to move your project away from CodeResort later.

Feedback?

Do you like the blog? Does it make sense? Do you have requests for changes or new additions to the functionality?

We made it for you, and appreciate any help you can give us in making this a useful feature.

Last night we upgraded CodeResort to a new version bringing lots of shiny new features. There will be in-depth introductions to new features and usage examples shortly to get you started using them, so for the moment I just wanted to provide some important information to current users about some changes that may involve minor updates in your projects related to wiki syntax:

1. The [[TOC]] macro has changed slightly, so for a list of pages 'starting with...' you now need to append a '*' to the partial pagename. Without the wildcard, it will only fetch the page with that exact name. Some of the other macros have also seen minor changes, so if they don't work as expected be sure to look at the Help page for HelpUser/WikiMacros.
2. Syntax for project- and server-relative linking has now changed. [/somewhere] now uses the project as root for urls, so if you want to link to some resource in another project you use this syntax to base it on the server root: [//somewhere]. Or, even better is the new InterWiki syntax that lets you make your own custom links to external resources. Check HelpUser/InterWiki for now - I'll blog about this in not too long.
3. The {{{#!html}}} syntax is still allowed, but each section now has to be valid html in order to render - if not, it will be skipped. The trick of embedding wiki inside some open and close html element sections now have a better solution using the new #!div and [[span]] syntax. Read up on this in Help; HelpUser/WikiAdvanced.

Updating all our own content, these were the most visible to us. If you find other issues that are not clearly covered here or in Help, please let us now. Perhaps by logging in and leaving a comment on this blog post.

Lastly, here are some of the new features that I have in my 'to-blog' list - make sure to check back soon or subscribe to the blog RSS feed:

• Project Blog for project-internal news and information, and even a public blog for any users that have created a profile at CodeResort.
• InterWiki link support.
• Improved ticket workflow and ticket and query improvements in general.
• Subversion 'Annotate' (Blame) of any file in the repository.
• Turn off or on features for your project.
• Wiki page templates for standardising content and structure of new wiki pages.
• ...and more.

Hope you enjoy the new release! Stay tuned!