Community News

After a brief hiatus (to welcome my daughter to the world!) we've finished up with our latest development cycle.  Numerous improvements have been made, and much of the credit for these goes to Janusz, our supremely talented programmer based near Warsaw.  The laundry list of issues addressed in these release is provided below.

In our next release cycle (code named Hydra 0.5), we are planning some very ambitious development goals, which include significant modifications to the planning and debate components, in addition to some minor modifications to the modeling backend.  I'm also hoping to begin our migration to Java Server Faces based portlets, in the hopes that we can extract ourselves from the Struts based quagmire we seem to be stuck in.

Stay tuned, exciting things will be happening over the next several months!

Hydra 0.4 Release Notes

New Features

1. Means for sending messages to a user from their profile
2. Email password to users
3. Generalized planing backend to support the addition of new plans - you won't see much in the interface on this one, but we're ready to start adding new plan types in future versions! 

Improvements

1. Removed discussion tab from debates, and updated the comment page for the discussion tab.
2. Deployment of new css now causes the browser to refresh its cache.
3. "Do not call" list for mass messaging component.
4. Removed Star Wars like ranking from message boards.
5. Ability for an administrator to sort topics on the debate page.
6. Added a new column in the user directory indicating the number of activities they have engaged in.
7. Added the ability to screen users from our google analytics tracking.
8. Terms of use checkbox in registration.
9. Captcha now has an explanatory message.

Bug Fixes

1. Entering names in the "send" field for messaging without selecting from the popup no longer results in an error.
2. Changing the post on a debate page now changes the post on the discussion page.
3. "Previous" button in "Community activities" now works.
4. Blog posts are now public by default.