Our release this week continues the tradition of great holiday upgrades. Read on for news about integrating with other systems used by your team, our upgrades to the Tickets tool, Wiki markup improvements, burndown charts, and portfolio management.
Webhook tool
A Webhook is how modern Web applications talk to each other. Assembla's new Webhook tool will post selected stream events (commits, ticket edits, wiki edits, etc.) to the URL of your choice. I want see what users do with this highly programmable capability. It's immediately useful for two main reasons:
- You can use the webhook to trigger a continuous integration build process. The Webhooks tool replaces the old post-commit hook, with the advantage of serving all of our repository types - svn, git, mercurial, github, and external svn.
- Distribute your news to other systems with REST API's. For example, we provide preconfigured formats to send your events to Basecamp, Present.ly, and Twitter.
If you are sending events to Twitter, you get an effect that is like the Twitter tool, but you can play with the form of the message, and you can send direct messages. Follow the instructions on the bottom of the page to compose your messages.
Wiki markup
You can now type links to any wiki page name, tickets, files, revisions, and images. There is a link guide on the bottom of the wiki edit page. A popular request at feedback.assembla.com reminded us that people were not satisfied with our CamelCase links to wiki pages. We implemented the suggestion to use Mediawiki style [[ link stuff ]] links. The double-bracket delimiter is unique enough to add to all of our formats (WYSIWIG and textile), and the textile format that we use for tickets.
Burndown chart
We have long featured a "Burndown" link on the Tickets tool, but until now, it wasn't very useful. This week's enhancements to the burndown chart give you a simple and complete way to find out the things that a burndown chart should tell you: How much work do you have remaining? How fast are you getting it done? How is it allocated to your workers? What are the big tasks? To use it, enter a "work hours remaining" estimate whenever you edit a ticket, and follow the instructions on the burndown page.
We also fulfilled a customer request and added work hours remaining as a field in the customer reports.
I'm going to post a separate article about how to use the burndown chart.
Simplified Ticket report / filter UI
Even I got lost making Ticket reports. The simplified "Manage filters" and "Search" forms In the Tickets tool solve the problem. We have renamed the reports "filters", out of deference to our Jira users.
Portfolio Payer management
If you manage a portfolio, you are probably also responsible for the subscriptions in member spaces. We now show the payer in the list of portfolio projects, and we give you subscription management links when you click through to the member space.
Watcher permissions - step toward the customer permissions
A customer account with restricted permissions is the number 1 and 3 request at feedback.assembla.com. We are implementing this by upgrading our read-only "Watcher" permission level for team members. In this release, you can select permissions for the Watcher role - All, Edit, View (default for watcher). In our next release, you will be able to set different permissions for each tool.