We will post a new release at 08:00 UTC tomorrow (March 2).  We will be offline for up to one hour, because we need to modify the data structure for millions of tickets.

The biggest new thing in this release is custom status values in tickets.  When we first introduced Assembla tickets, we offered a very simple workflow.  Tickets could be "New", "Accepted" when someone was working on them, ready to "Test", and "Invalid" or "Fixed" when they were closed.  This turned out to be self explaining, and meet most needs, and surprisingly few people asked for modifications.

However, over time we got requests for custom status values and workflow. Two of the top five requests on feedback.assembla.com are custom status, and a more flexible "assigned" status.  This new release answers both of those requests.

If you are one of our many Tickets users, please read on so that you will know what to expect when you look at your tasks and issues after the release.

The comments form has a new layout where you can see all of your open and closed status values, and assign.

On the old comments form, we enforced a little bit of workflow.  You always moved to "assigned" when you assigned a user, and had more work if you wanted to assign on the "test" step.  Some users didn't like this.  So, in the new release you can use the comments form to set any status, and assign at any time.

If you want to add different open or closed status values, go to the Tickets/settings page, and scroll to the bottom.  There you can add, remove, and re-order the status values.

There are some changes to the way we update tickets from commit comments.  We no longer have special cases for "closes" and "close" and "fixes" to set "closed" and "fixed" status.  To update ticket #4 from a commit comment, you must write "<status> #4", for example, "test #4" or "Fixed #4".  It is not case sensitive.