Today's release includes a new Agile Planner for Assembla Tickets, navigation improvements for large wikis, better user profiles, and many smaller improvements.

Site announcements

You might have found us with the black announcement bar on top of the Assembla.com site.  Thanks for reading!  To hide the announcement and go back to work, just click on the red button on the right side.

User Profiles

You can find user profiles at a simplified address: www.assembla.com/profile/.  We've enhanced the profiles to make it easier to see what people are doing on publicly visible projects.

Agile Planner for Tickets

The Agile Planner is a new tab on the Tickets tool that helps you add, edit, and manage the ticket list.  Using the Agile Planner you can:

• Build your plan quickly by adding, editing, and dragging tickets in an ajax interface with popup panels.
• Specify complete features with "Story" or "Feature" tickets, and then fill them out with task tickets. On the left colum, you will see story/feature tickets in an expandable outline.
• See your tickets in a hierarchical view.  You can see and organize all of the tasks under any story or feature.  This is an important visualization that our customers have asked for.
• Blend this feature view (what you will do) with the milestone view (when you will do it). In the right column, you will see a list of milestones, and you can drag tickets to schedule them.  This is exciting for me, because in the past I recommended not listing features in an outline form.  The outline makes it harder to plan incrementally, because when things are presented in outline order, it looks like you need to finish all of the subtasks before you can do a release.  Actually, you want to make a miminum useful feature, and then releas it, and then come back and finish it.  In the Agile Planner, each ticket can appear twice.  It appears once in the Feature/Story where you plan out WHAT you are going to do.  Then, when you drag it across to the other view, it appears a second time under the Milestone where you plan WHEN you are going to do it.  The conflict is resolved.

Hierarchical Wiki Navigation

Some of our users are building wikis with a lot of pages - more than they want to manage in our simple sidebar menu.  The new wiki navigation gives them a hierarchical menu.  To reorganize your wiki pages, just select the re-order control on the top right of the wiki page header.  You will see an outline control where you can drop pages beside other wiki pages (the - prompt) or as children under a header page (the -> prompt).  We have also made some improvements to the page layout.