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!

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.

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!