This week's release contains enhancements to email alert controls, comments, search, cardwall, code review,API and Mercurial, and more.

Sorting on the Cardwall

You can now sort tickets inside a cardwall column.  Just drag the ticket to a new position.  If you are a “sorter" who likes to put tasks in a specific order, this is for you.  It sounds like a simple feature, but we actually wrote a lot of javascript, and tried a number of ways of making the sort intuitive, while keeping the sorting simple for the majority of our users who are happy with the high/normal/low priority sort.  When you drag from one status column to the next, the ticket will drop into a position that is automatically calculated from its date and priority.  This makes it easy to drop into a column with a lot of cards.  You  can then drag a ticket up and down in the column.  It will stay exactly where you drop it.  If you move it to a new Priority area, it changes priority to match the place where you dropped it.

This feature helps you run an XP or Kanban process where you sort the tickets in the “New” column, and then pull the top ticket into a working status.

Better control over default email alerts

Before this release, new team members got a fixed set of email alerts, and immediately started receiving email about tickets, commits, etc.  For many teams, this is too much email, and it was a deterrent to adding new team members.   Now, you can control the email alerts that new team members get, and even turn them off completely.

-- Space owners can set the default alert settings for new team members.  You will see a new link on the Space/Admin page for “Email Alert Settings”.

-- When you create a space, email alert settings are inherited from the template configuration.  So, we can tune the alert settings for our configurations, and if you make your own project templates, you can set the default alerts on those.

-- As always, users can edit these email alerts preferences.   We moved the preference form to an “email settings” subtab on the Stream page.

-- We improved the alert formats in the hourly summaries to make that option more useful.

-- Now, the space Stream page shows all events by default.   You can use the sidebar filter to find specific events.  Previously, Stream was showing only the events that you selected for email alerts, which usually did not include “My own changes”.   People were confused when they went to the Stream page and didn’t see something that they were sure they just did.

Search upgrades

We completely rebuilt the search interface  so that it actually useful.  Now when you search, you get results in an improved format with a sidebar that helps you refine your search

-- Search for recently updated items – today, this week, this month.  This is the most useful improvement.

-- Search specific objects (Tickets, Wiki, Files, Space names)

-- Search in a Portfolio, as well as in a space, your spaces, or public spaces

Edit ticket comments

You can now edit your own ticket comments by using the “edit” link in the comment list.  It’s very satisfying.  Users have been complaining that they could not edit these comments and fix spelling errors.  I argued that it would be strange to edit comments and leave them different from their email alerts, but I was wrong.

And More

New Wiki editor:  We installed an upgraded WYSIWIG Wiki  editor.  It works better with IE9.  We also fixed other IE9 rendering bugs.

Mercurial Code Browser:  We applied fixes for the Mercurial code browser to eliminate cases where file and diff views were hanging.

API enhancement:  GET a list of available custom status values

Improved Changeset commenting:  See the blog article

Reliability: Commits are now replicated in real time across multiple EC2 regions, so no repositories will be stuck offline because of a failure in one datacenter.