Announcements

Announcing support for Beanstalk and Bitbucket Git

Christian Hammond

We’re happy to announce that we’ve added support for two heavily requested code hosting services: Beanstalk, and Bitbucket Git repositories.

 

Welcome, Beanstalk!

Beanstalk is a code hosting and development service with support for Git and Subversion. It integrates with a variety of services and offers easy deployment to servers. They offer a free 30 day trial, and have reasonably priced packages for teams and businesses of all sizes.

To add a Beanstalk repository to RBCommons, you first need to enable API support for your account. Log into Beanstalk and click Account on the top-right. Then scroll down to Developer API and enable it.

Then, on RBCommons, simply add a repository and choose Beanstalk as the hosting service. Enter your Beanstalk account domain (the mydomain part of mydomain.beanstalkapp.com), your repository name, and save. You’re set up!

 

Bitbucket Git is finally here

As of today, you’ll be able to use Git repositories hosted on Bitbucket. Before today, Bitbucket was only usable with Mercurial. You can simply add your repository like any other repository. Just choose Bitbucket as the hosting service, and Git for the repository type.

You will need to install RBTools 0.5.2 and use rbt post in order to post your diffs for Bitbucket Git repositories. Unfortunately, due to some limitations in the Bitbucket APIs, you cannot use git diff or older versions of RBTools.

 

To all new users

We have guides for helping you get set up quickly. Please see our Getting Started guide, and Posting Patches for Review.

If you’re signing up for Beanstalk or Bitbucket Git support, let us know! You can tell us where you came from when creating your team.

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Site Update: New goodies and speedups

Christian Hammond

We’ve deployed some new updates to RBCommons that should please many of you. Let’s go through the highlights.

 

New “Depends On” field

When you’re working with several inter-dependent changes, it’s helpful to give your fellow teammates a heads up on what depends on what. That helps them prioritize what to review, and gives them some context on what they’re looking at.

We’ve added a Depends On field to review requests for listing the review request IDs your change depends on. Each listed review request will then show that they block your change. A small change, but one we’re sure will be helpful to many of you.

 

Performance Improvements

We’ve worked hard to improve performance for uploading new diffs. From here on, as you begin to upload and view more diffs, we collect more information on what files and revisions we know exist, and which we know don’t exist. We use this to avoid some of the lookups we used to do before against your repositories.

For those of you who are very active and use GitHub, this drastically reduces the API lookups we have to do, speeding up diffs, and making it even harder to hit the dreaded GitHub API rate limits.

 

Nicer dashboard refreshing

The dashboard used to do a full-page reload every so often to refresh your view, which was.. noticeable. It was also pretty nasty when your connection to the server was interrupted, or when it tried to refresh during an RBCommons server upgrade, as you would come back to an error page.

You won’t see these issues anymore. The dashboard intelligently refreshes itself without a full page reload, and is resistant to temporary outages.

 

And more

There’s also a handful of bug fixes and some interface polish, particularly around issue tracking. We hope you like this update.

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PDF Review Beta 2

David Trowbridge

A few weeks ago, we did our first private beta release for an extension for collaborative peer review of PDF documents. If you haven’t seen it yet, we encourage you to check out the original announcement, which explains the basic workflow.

Since that first release, we’ve received a lot of great feedback, and have been working hard to improve it. We’re proud to announce a new beta release, with several significant improvements:

  • Continuous scroll through the document!
  • Significant performance improvements when switching between pages.
  • Review emails now contain the selected sections for each comment.
  • Comments on the “Reviews” page and in review emails now link to the relevant page in the document.
  • Improved interaction when dragging out comment areas.
  • Improved visual layout, maximizing the amount of space for the document.
  • Fixed an issue where the page would continually make requests to the server when thumbnail storage fails (for example, if the PIL version on the server can’t handle PNG compression).

pdf-continuous-scroll

If you already signed up for the beta, you should have an email explaining how to install it (or upgrade from the first beta). If you haven’t signed up, but would like to participate, please fill out our sign-up form and we’ll be in touch.

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PDF Review Beta

David Trowbridge 2 Comments

A little while ago, we announced that we were building document review features for Review Board. This will be available as a commercial extension in order to help fund the project. Of course, once it’s ready, RBCommons customers will get it as part of their normal plans. I’d like to show off a bit what you’ll be able to expect.

Since Review Board 1.6, you’ve been able to attach arbitrary files to review requests. For anything except images, the only way to view them was to download them. You could add general comments to these files, but for large things like a document, you couldn’t use the direct commenting that we’ve all come to love from the diff viewer.

With the PDF Review extension, when you upload a PDF file, it gets a thumbnail and a “Review” link.

review-request

Clicking on this file will open up the PDF Review UI, which has controls to navigate the document. The file is rendered directly in the browser with no plugins (which requires a relatively modern browser).

pdf-viewer

Like image review (and screenshots before it), you can add a comment to the document by clicking and dragging over the area that you’d like to talk about.

adding-a-comment

When you publish, the areas that you selected will be copied into the review along with the page number on which they occurred.

review

If you signed up for the beta program already, you should have received an email with instructions on how to install and activate this extension. If not, feel free to sign up and we’ll get in touch!

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Making RBCommons more inviting

David Trowbridge

We’ve just deployed a change that makes it much easier to get your team set up on RBCommons. Until now, if you wanted to add a new user, you’d have to register an account first, and then add the username in your team administration dashboard.

Going forward, instead of registering an account first, you can just add the email addresses of each of your teammates. They’ll get an email with a special sign-up link, and once they create their account, they’ll be automatically added to your team.

admin-users

As usual, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch.

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RBCommons: New and Improved

Christian Hammond

Tonight, we deployed a major update to RBCommons that brings with it an improved look and feel and an assortment of new features.

RBCommons, as you may know, is powered by Review Board. Historically, we’ve used Review Board 1.6 under the hood, but now we’re on 1.7, the latest and greatest.

 

Shiny!

The first thing you should notice when you next log in is that there’s a cleaner, smoother feel to the site. Fewer sharp edges. More consistent font sizes. We’ve strived to bring more consistency and to shed a lot of our older warts. This will only get better from here on out.

As an example, look at how a review request used to look:

Old Look and Feel

Compared to how it now looks:

New Look and Feel

 

Improved Issue Tracking

It can be hard to keep track of all the issues your teammates want you to fix, especially if there’s a lot of reviews. Sometimes things just get missed. That would happen to us, at least, so we decided to fix it.

A summary of all opened issues is now shown right on the review request, making it easy to see how much work you have to do. You can filter the list or jump down to the relevant comments with one click.

Issue Summary Table

 

 

Moved Files in Diffs

If you’re using RBCommons with Git or Perforce, we’ll now show your moved files intelligently, instead of one big delete and one big add. That means you can move a file, make some changes, post it for review, and you’ll see those changes show up. Much easier to review!

 

Better File Attachments

We used to support uploading both screenshots and arbitrary file attachments, and you had to tell us which it was. Pretty ugly. It’s much simpler now. Just drag-and-drop your file onto the review request, and it’ll be attached. We’ll even show a preview of the file if we can (currently this supports images, MarkDown files, ReStructured Text files, and generic text-based files).

Just like before, you can review images, just like diffs. We’re going to be adding this ability for other types of files in the future.

 

Like it? Hate it? Have questions?

Let us know!

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Adding Multiple Team Admins

Christian Hammond

We always had the ability for your team to have multiple administrators, but that’s been something that we’d have to set for you. This has been one of our more common requests as of late. So we’ve made it easy for you to assign new administrators to your team.

In your Team Admin page, you’ll now see a little pencil next to each of your users. Click the pencil and you’ll see a dropdown with an Administrator checkbox.

 

Assign an administrator

 

Guess what happens when you check it?

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Announcing Default Reviewers

Christian Hammond

Find yourself typing the same reviewers over and over, for every new review request? Us too. You don’t have to deal with that anymore.

Administrators can now decide what groups or users will be assigned by default for new review requests. There’s a lot of flexibility here. You can determine the default reviewers based on file paths (which are based on regular expressions), and these can be configured across all repositories or just one or two. Create as many configurations as you want for all your needs.

To configure these, just go into your Team Admin page and click Default Reviewers on the left, then Add a default reviewer.

Tip: If you’re a small team, you can have all new review requests automatically assigned to a group. Just:

  1. Add a default reviewer.
  2. Leave your list of specific repositories blank. This way, it’ll apply to all of them
  3. Set the File regular expression field to: “.*” (without the quotes)
  4. Choose your group and save.
  5. Post a review request to test it out.

If you have any questions on configuring these, contact us at any time.

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Announcing Easy Plan Changes

Christian Hammond

As RBCommons grows, more and more of you have grown with it, and have outgrown your old plans. While we’re just an e-mail away (say hi sometime!) and have been happy to switch your team to more roomy plans, that’s just frankly taking up more of your time than you deserve.

Starting today, you can switch your team’s plan on the Account and Billing section of your Team Administration page. Just find the plan that best suits your needs and click Change Plan. After a few seconds, your team will be all set with the new plan. You can change at any time, and your account will be prorated for the month.

Of course, you’ll only be able to switch to a plan that’s big enough for your team.

If you’ve discussed an educational plan with us for a class, please contact us before switching your plan.

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