I’ve been busy with getting the upgrade of our Projects website (http://projects.blender.org) working properly. As you may know, our current site is severely limited in its usefulness for user, especially when it comes to searching for and reporting of bugs. A combination of old software and a bad database forced us to close down some of the areas, put them behind login. This is not very nice for the user (neither for the developer), and one of the symptoms is a lot of duplicate reports.
For a looooong time I’ve been working on different forms of an improved website. I tried Redmine for a while, but it became apparent that it is absolutely not suitable for our needs: lots of users (14k+ registered users), lots of reports (for Blender close to 10k). This is pure suicide for a server running Redmine. Some other things were tried as well (I had even a simple, working bug tracker implemented in Lua on top of Sputnik with all projects and artifacts imported, but maintaining that would’ve been too time consuming).
So after a long time we decided to go for a FusionForge upgrade. This also floated around for a long while, so a few weeks ago I put myself to finally, properly do this. A lot of effort has gone into getting the database upgraded, the software upgraded and customised for our needs. I’m glad that the end is in sight, but before it’s online I give you a short overview of what the upgraded site will look like. Note that I still work style and layout issues, but as a functional tool it shows already what it can (ignore jesterPrincess giving her opinion at some point in the screencast)
