Category: Uncategorized

We’re happy to announce the availability of the second beta of v6.1.0. This has a number of bugfixes to the document manager plugin along with minor fixes to other areas. We are hoping this represents our last beta before the official release of v6.1.0. As with the first beta, it is not for use on production websites.

For a complete run-down of some of the changes in this v6.1.0 release please see the ChangeLog file in the download or you can read all about it on this blog.

We wanted to let customers of GForge Advanced Server know that we have scheduled three webinars in July where we will give a quick demonstration of the new features and enhancements in version 6.1.0 and to share a draft of our development roadmap. After the demo we want to cover the development roadmap, giving our customers a chance to let us know if we are on the right track with the planned improvements. An email has already been sent to the primary support contacts for each of our customer accounts. If you haven’t received the email for some reason and want to participate just shoot a note to feedback@gforgegroup.com and we’ll send you the information. The three webinars will be held Tuesday, July 10th from 1-2:30pm CST, Thursday, July 12th from 1-2:30pm CST and Wednesday, July 18th from 8-9:30am CST. We hope to see you there!

We’re happy to announce the availability of the first beta of v6.1.0. The key update in the release is the complete revamp of the document manager which includes HTML5 support for drag-n-drop. We’ve also wired in drag-n-drop support to the plugins including the tracker, wiki, etc. You can head over to our download page now. Please be sure to read the INSTALL and UPGRADE documents. As with all beta software, it is not for use on production websites.

For a complete run-down of some of the changes in this release please see the ChangeLog file in the download or you can read all about it on this blog.

We’ve been hard at work putting the finishing touches on our next GForge Advanced Server Release, version 6.1.0 (due out in Beta soon0. One of the notable changes we wanted to make sure everybody knows about is the addition of the GForge daemon process. This release we spent some time getting our “house” in order by fixing a few annoying things our users wanted immediate access to but had to wait upwards of 15 minutes for. Specifically, with v6.1.0 the following actions will take place immediately:

• Project creation, including the creation of the version control repository
• Changing the version control plugin (e.g. SVN -> Git). NOTE: it will not convert the repository itself.
• New project members get immediate access to all parts of the project.
• New mailing lists are immediately available.

If you plan to do a fresh v6.1.0 install you don’t have to do anything as we assume you will be using the daemon by default. Anybody upgrading will want to be sure to check out the UPGRADE document in the distribution where we explain how you can enable the daemon on an existing installation.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything on the progress of our next release of GForge Advanced Server so we wanted to take a minute to let our customers know what has been cooking in our labs. In some of our last posts we hinted at some improvements and new features in GForge Advanced Server but we’ve finally been able to draw a line in the sand as to which features will make the cut for this release. While this release is bigger than our last couple of releases it really pales in comparison to what we have planned going forward.

For this 6.1.0 release, slated for Mid-May, the following features and enhancements will be:

• Completely revamped Docman plugin. The user interface for our document management plugin has been completely revamped to support HTML5 and, specifically, drag-n-drop support. In addition to the updated interface, the document management plugin will allow a single a file to appear in multiple folders.
• Included with the document management updates, we are integrating a new file upload widget we created to be used in Tracker Items, File Releases, Forum Posts and any other parts of the system where you currently upload files. This means the new drag-n-drop functionality will be available in all those areas, too!
• The installation process has been vastly improved. On new installations administrators need only run a single script which will check that the host server is running on a supported platform and then it will take care of the rest. Our old installation not only had three steps, it also required the administrator to tell us which operating system they were running. No more!
• Using Git or Subversion In prior releases of GForge Advanced Server you had to choose using HTTP or SSH across all projects. In 6.1.0 you can specify at the project level whether you prefer to use HTTP or SSH.
• Richer content. Prior to the upcoming 6.1.0 release you didn’t have much in the way of options for customizing your content. We’ve upgraded the WYSIWYG editor and baked in some industrial strength HTML filtering which means you can now securely create richer HTML content in Tracker Items, Blog posts, Wiki, etc.
• Addition of script execution in Tracker Workflow. Being able to define a concrete process for your bugs and feature requests has been one of the flagship features of GForge Advanced Server’s Tracker. We build on that in 6.1.0 by adding the ability to have user developed scripts executed as part of that workflow process.
• The addition of a daemon process. Currently new projects registered in GForge Advanced Server take as long as 15 minutes to be fully created. With the new daemon process newly create projects, complete with your version control repository, will be immediately available.
• We’ve added password aging. By default it is turned off but you can, optionally, require that users change their password after some predetermined amount of time.

While we are putting the finishing touches on 6.1.0, we’ve already started in on the next version which highlights a few key features:

• Revamped user interface – You will quickly be able to change between projects and within sections within those projects. We’ve done this in a way that eliminates the left navigation bar that is now, frankly, dated.
• Addition of Favorite Projects – We realize that over time the projects you are actively engaged in changes. Now you can quickly setup your favorite projects that will only be a click away.
• Access to Notifications – Notifications pending action by site administrators and project administrators are buried in the current interface. Future versions of GForge Advanced Server will make any pending notification obvious and quickly accessible to the user.
• Quick access to search – Future versions of GForge Advanced Server will have a search bar right in the header allowing you to quickly find projects, users and content.
• REST API – While the SOAP interface has served us well, REST is where it is at and we’re introducing a new REST API that is far easier to use over the current SOAP implementation. This means integrating GForge Advanced Server with other systems will be much easier to do.
• Mobile Support – With the REST API in place, we can finally get serious about adding mobile support to GForge Advanced Server. With mobile support you’ll be able to stay engaged with your projects while you are on the go.

We hope you all are as excited as we are about the upcoming 6.1.0 release as well as what we have currently slated for future releases. We’ll begin reaching out to customers in May to setup focus groups where GForge Advanced Server customers can talk with our product development team about plans for future releases. This will give you all a chance to help us identify features and enhancements you’d like to see in GForge Advanced Server as we move ahead. As always we welcome any feedback you might have so feel free to drop us a line at feedback@gforgegroup.com or follow us on Twitter.

We are releasing GForge Advanced Server 6.0.1 today which is a security and bugfix release which all customers are strongly encouraged to upgrade to. To help aid customers in receiving timely information about security related issues and releases we have started a new mailing list you can you can subscribe to. We’ll continue to post information about all releases here but the mailing list will allow customers to receive timely updates about security updates without having to explicitly check our blog.

Here are the changes:

• [#7368] On Docman, the default behaviour when the ‘Allow Unprivileged Upload’ setting doesn’t exists in the db is to deny uploads, however the plugin settings admin page will display that setting as enabled
• [#7373] MyStuff keeps showing tracker data after the user has been removed from the (private) project
• [#7393] In the front page, the news/blog posts are shown even if the plugin is disabled on a given project.
• [#7401] SELinux prevents loading of ioncube when running install-gforge-1-deps.php
• [#7413] Newer versions of git show “fatal: This operation must be run in a work tree” on the post-commit trigger
• [#7419] FRS: Sorting list of files by package name could corrupt the rendering of the table
• [#7425] Short php tags in plugins/userblog/wwwlib/index.php
• [#7427] Docman: Setting a folder as public lets you download documents even if the project is private
• [#7428] git: When deleting a remote branch, the deletion will succeed but an error message is shown
• [#7450] Sanitize $_GET, $_REQUEST, $_POST and $_COOKIE parameters
• [#7451] Gantt chart shows the arrows for dependent items backwards
• [#7457] Git: commits are stored in the database with the push date instead of the commit date
• [#7517] git: seems like pushing a new branch to the master repository re-parses the whole commit history
• [#7521] Default user name regexp allows for backslashes to be used in user name
• [#7522] The old SOAP api seems populate projects without checking permissions
• [#7523] git: Tracker item -> commits tab shows whole commit hash
• [#7541] Fatal error when deleting a user from a project
• [#7544] Option for editing/deleting snippets only shows for site admin
• [#7545] Make git commit email show the diff for the commit
• [#7574] The query for not approved forum messages in the My page is inefficient
• [#7638] svn’s pre_commit_checks script doesn’t output an error message on ACL error
• [#7983] In sql update file 20111122.sql we use DROP TABLE IF EXISTS, which is only support starting from postgresql 8.2
• [#8054] Unauthorized access to 250 usernames
• [#8056] Unauthorized access to last 50 user login information
• [#8057] Fix Vulnerability: SQL Query discloses database table, column information and password hash
• [#8058] Fix Vulnerability: Cross-Site Scripting reported by Mateusz Krzeszowiec via Secunia SVCRP
• [#8059] Login to application possible without administrators approval
• [#8085] In centos6 php has been updated to 5.3.3, php eaccelerator has been compiled for php 5.3.2

To all our valued customers we want to wish you all best wishes in 2012!

Now that the New Year is here, we wanted to take a quick minute to share our plans for GForge Advanced Server for 2012 and beyond. As many of you know Tim Perdue, the founder of GForge, passed away last September. Since that time our team has been working on evaluating how we do business and how we can improve our products and services and we’re happy to share some exciting information about the direction of GForge Advanced Server.

Beginning immediately we are adopting a formal release schedule that our customers can count on. The release schedule is meant to make our planning efforts more efficient but, more importantly, give our customers a set schedule they can use to plan upgrades to their GForge Advanced Server instances. To that end, we will be providing two major releases per year: March and September. Major releases, as the name implies, will focus on new features and improved processes. We will also be publishing two maintenance releases each year in January and June and those will focus on bug fixes and only the most trivial of new features.

While I have had the pleasure of working with many of our customers over the past four months, I still feel many of you have some great ideas on how we can improve GForge. To that end we are about launching two new initiatives. The first initiative is a marketing survey. For the marketing survey we randomly selected customers based within specific demographics (e.g. size, organizational goals, country, etc). The customers that were selected have been contacted already and the survey will begin immediately. For those of you who did not get selected, we do welcome you to participate and to do so just send a note to feedback@gforgegroup.com indicating you want to participate in the survey and how (either email or phone). The results of the marketing survey will be used to ensure we continue moving GForge Advanced Server in the right direction for you all but, also, to help us identify and better connect with prospective customers.

The second initiative we are launching in 2012 is a customer focus group. These focus groups will occur twice annually to match up with our two major releases and the focus will be on helping us with release planning. This will be the best way to pitch new features, improvements to existing features and any other concerns you may have. The first customer focus group will occur in February or March to help us solidify our September release plan and begin on the March 2013 release. To do this, we intend to conduct these focus groups via two or three conference calls (e.g. GoToMeeting) and we will be sure all current GForge customers get notified of the dates.

A couple of other things of note is we plan to formally offer GForge Advanced Server under a Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) model toward the end of 2012. To facilitate this, we are announcing that we plan on shutting down the domain gforge.org sometime in June or July. This won’t affect many of our customers but the projects currently hosted under gforge.org will be migrated over to gforge.com along with the gforge support forum that was intended for users of GForge Community Edition and non-paying Advanced Server customers who are under the 15 user limit of the default license. Once the data migration happens we will shutdown gforge.org and begin implementation of the SaaS model under the gforge.com domain.

To wrap things up, we’d like to share our plans for the release coming out at the end of March. These plans, while not concrete, should give our you a clear picture of what you can expect in the next release and as we make changes to the release we’ll be sure to share those on our blog. The plan for the March release includes:
Addition of a GForge Daemon Process – The current GForge model uses scheduled tasks to do things like create new SCM repositories and mailing lists. The new daemon will allow much of what used to be in our scheduled tasks to occur immediately.
Document Manager User Interface Upgrade – The document manager, while functional, leaves a lot to be desired. Many of our customers said that the clunky UI simply made this feature unusable and, instead, they opted to use SCM for document storage. The user interface upgrade will make the document manager much more usable and will include basic support for file drag-n-drop into the browser.

• User-based Git Repositories – Git is gaining the lion’s share of the SCM market and user-based SCM repositories will allow for a more collaborative software environment.
• Pull requests for Git Repositories – Going hand-in-hand with user-based Git repositories, we’ll be implementing pull requests allowing cloned repositories to send pull requests to the maintainers of master Git repositories. This will make use of GForge’s existing tracker feature.
• Per-project SCM customizations – Right now GForge Advanced Server support CVS, SVN and Git but with SVN and Git you have to, on a site-wide basis, choose to use HTTPS or SSH. This release will allow the use of HTTP or SSH to be done at the project level.
• Password aging – Right now there is no default aging process for user passwords. Support for password aging wil include the ability to specify how long passwords are good before expiring.
• REST API – While our SOAP API has served us well, it introduces a slough of issues with respect to interoperability, file uploads and the SOAP payload is big. The REST API will make integrating GForge with other systems easier and will open the door for us to provide customers with mobile support on iOS and Android devices.
• Support for execution of workflow scripts – Our trackers have supported workflow implementation for years and this release we’ll be adding the ability to add hooks to execute scripts as part of a defined workflow process.
• Refresh of the Microsoft Project Plugin – The current version of the Microsoft Project plugin was written in Visual Basic 6 and only supported older versions of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Project. This refresh is a port to .NET which will allow GForge integration into the latest versions of Project using the latest versions of the Windows operating system. We’re also happy to announce that the Microsoft Project Plugin will be free to all customers using the Enterprise Edition of GForge Advanced Server.

Some things we are considering for future releases include:

• Peer code review
• Possible Support for Mercurial DVCS
• Support for Ubuntu (mainly to make evaluation on developer workstations easier)
• Complete user interface redesign – The goal here is to reduce the number of page refreshes, boost performance and, most important, make GForge more fun to use.

Mobile support for iOS and Andriod devices – These implementations will use the REST API planned for the March release.
As you see, we have a busy 2012 planned and we look forward to working you in making GForge Advanced Server better. As always, if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at feedback@gforgegroup.com.