And So It Begins…

I’ve finished my AP and SATII exams for a few weeks (which had been previously occupying a significant amount of my time) so now I can really get working on Bugdar.

At the moment, nothing exciting is happening except back-end changes. I’m cleaning up the code quite a bit using the ISSO2 API system, which removes a lot of the insert/update database logic. These APIs will also make it possible to write converters for Bugdar, Mantis, etc. so that those users can switch! Also, APIs will allow customizations to be made much easier (if you’d ever need to change the Bugdar code..?).

I can’t wait to start cracking on the new features, but of course, major back-end changes should be done first to make adding the new features easier.

Edoc and ISSO Reased

Although it’s four days late, I finally released Edoc 2 and ISSO 2. It’s been an exhausting week by no stretch of the imagination. I have not had the time to release before now, but I finally got the website finished up and decided to deploy tonight.

For your own edification, this is how I prepare a release:

1. Test installing from fresh in a new database

2. Test upgrading from previous versions

3. On the development version of the isiwww main site, make sure the download package works (set up the versions in the download manager and make it work just like it would live)

4. Upload new versions to www.iris-studios.com and dog-food to make sure everything is okay

5. Insert new version records into the download manager and queue up the sources for deployment (this is what drives the download forms; I’ll explain how this works later)

6. svn update the isiwww to deploy the new site

7. Check download packages to make sure they work (rollback to previous site and start at step one again if they don’t work)

8. Tag all the necessary repositories for the release

So it’s out. Enjoy :). Bugdar 1.1 will now start development.

Release Date is Set

I have set the release date for Edoc 2.0 and ISSO2 to be this Monday, 24 April 2006. All of the code looks good-to-go and I’ve yet to find a bug that would stop the release.

At the moment, I’m writing the content for the website so that it will be ready to deploy on Monday. There will probably not be a lot of documentation, sans installing, because I don’t have a lot of time to write it and I want to get Edoc out the door so I can work on Bugdar. However, I will work on documenting it little-by-little in the coming months.

If all goes well, development on Bugdar 1.1 will start on Monday!

Edoc 2.0 in Release Candidate Stage

As of now, Edoc 2.0 is feature-complete and everything should be ready for release. I’m now going through and testing all of the functionality to make sure that I’ve ironed out all the bugs I can before I release it. Also, I’m preparing the materials for the www.iris-studios.com site for the release: updating the product page, homepage, etc. and when those are finished I should be ready to release Edoc 2.0! I expect to release Edoc over the weekend or very early (Monday or Tuesday) next week.

Of course, once Edoc is released work on Bugdar 1.1 will get underway. I’m very excited to start knocking off things on my private to-do list and on the public bug tracker. I’ll post regular updates on how work is progressing as I’m developing Bugdar 1.1. I’ll also let you know when the email notifications system is done so that those who are interested can use that feature in the alpha/beta version.

Style is Finished!

I have just finished the style used by Edoc’s administration section. This will also be used in Bugdar 1.1 when it’s converted to use ISSO2:

View the New Style

However, the new style is only truly great-looking in Firefox and WebKit (Safari) browsers. It will look decent in Opera 9, and it will look not-so-decent in Internet Explorer 6. The major thing that breaks is the tabs; but they don’t even break function-wise, just display-wise.

Now the only thing left to do before releasing Edoc2 is implementing the new navigation system.