One feature request we have often heard from our customers is to deliver the notification emails in HTML. The reason for this is that many email readers, such as Gmail, use dynamic-width fonts for displaying text emails, and this makes the default ticket notifications from Trac hard to read. Well, we have not only added HTML emails, but we have also revamped our entire notification system.

Each user now has full control over their notification settings from the My Profile page. From there, they can specify separate notification settings for each project they belong to. The following notification types are offered:

• Repository Commits: Every time a commit is made to the project’s repository.
• Ticket Changes: Every time a ticket is created or modified.
• Wiki Changes: Every time a wiki page is created or changed.
• Backup Completions: Every time an automated backup has been completed. You may then choose to download the backup.
• Invoices: For account administrators, a copy of the monthly invoice is sent each time the account is billed.

Tickets

You may specify which tickets you would like to receive notifications for:

• All: All tickets regardless of your involvement with the ticket.
• My Components: Tickets whose component you are an owner of.
• Owned By Me: Tickets that you own.
• Reported By Me: Tickets that you are the reporter of.
• Updated By Me: Tickets you change.

Watch This

You may also specify specific wiki pages and tickets that you would like to receive notifications for, regardless of your notification settings. To do this, simply click the “Watch This” link in the top-right corner of the screen when you are viewing a ticket or wiki page. To stop watching an item, simply click the “Unwatch This” link.

By default, all notification emails have now been switched to use HTML by default. However, if you would like to return to plain text emails, you may choose to on your My Profile page. We hope you enjoy this new feature, and of course we always welcome your feedback on how to make our services even better.

One of the top reasons why our customers choose Repository Hosting is that we allow them to have as many projects and users in their account as they’d like, at no additional charge. We just don’t believe in charging extra based on artificial metrics such as the number of projects. As a result, 1/6 of our customers have 10 or more projects in their account, and some have more than 50. However, until today, managing large numbers of projects and users could get a bit cumbersome.

Today we have rolled out a brand new version of the account dashboard, an updated permissions interface, and various enhancements throughout our service. The purpose of these changes is to make managing large numbers of projects and users easy and efficient. We have streamlined many of the commonly performed actions and added additional data to the dashboard. The biggest change is the ability to group projects into categories and users into groups. You can then set permissions on a category and they will be inherited by all the projects within that category. The same thing is true for groups and users.

Changes and Features

• The list of projects or users may be instantly filtered by typing into the filter box.
• Projects and users are now created right from the Dashboard. The “Create and Add Another” button may be used to quickly create multiple users.
• Additional information, such as repository type, disk usage, and last commit date is listed under each project in order to better identify and compare them.
• Projects and users are now visually grouped.
• Projects may now be archived. Archived projects will still take up space, but they will become inaccessible and not be listed on the dashboard.
• Similary, users may be disabled, in which case they cannot log in.
• Projects may now be forked. This creates a new project that has a copy of the original repository.
• Similarly, projects may now be copied, which makes a complete copy of the repository, shared drive, Trac data, settings, and permissions. This is useful when using one project as a template for new projects.

• The permission page has been moved to a tab on the Project Settings page.
• Permissions may now be set from the project, category, user, or group settings pages.
• Trac permissions, such as WIKI_READ, that have been assigned to users are now listed on the permissions page.

• The width of the pages has been increased to match the Trac layout.
• Trac may be completely turned off for a project.
• Incoming email can now be managed from the Project Settings page, instead of the Account Settings page.

Check out the new changes and let us know what you think. Now go create some more projects!

We are excited to launch support today for Mercurial repositories. Mercurial, cleverly abbreviated Hg, is a distributed version control system originally created for Linux kernel development, though Linux went with Git instead. It is currently used by many projects including Firefox and OpenOffice. Although it has a smaller market share than Subversion or Git, it is quickly growing in popularity.

Mercurial vs Git vs Subversion

Mercurial is very similar to Git. It is distributed, meaning that every copy of the repository contains the full history. As a result, commits and most other commands are local operations and therefore very fast. You only interact with Repository Hosting when you hg push your commits up to your project, or
hg pull others’ changes down to your local repository. Mercurial is very lightweight and can be used on projects of any size, from something as big as an open-source project like Firefox down to versioning your local documents folder.

A few improvements over Git that Mercurial offers is that it is a bit more intuitive to use and has great documentation. It also labels commits with both Git-style hashes and SVN-style integers, a compromise that makes it easier to follow the flow of commits. Git, though, is better for power users as it provides greater flexibility and control over the workflows.

The difference between Mercurial and Subversion is the difference between distributed version control systems and centralized ones. Although Subversion’s workflow is a little bit simpler, it lacks the speed, offline usability, and excellent branching and merging of Mercurial. A good overview of the similarities and differences of the major version control systems can be found here.

Give it a try

All of our features, such as Trac plugins, notifications, and commit messages now support Mercurial. To use Mercurial, simply create a new project in your account and select Mercurial as the Repository System. We hope you will enjoy this new Repository Hosting feature!

Time is money. But how much money? To answer that question, you have to be able to track your work time, and we decided to add some plugins to help you do just that. The popular Timing and Estimation plugin allows you to track both the estimated and actual time worked on a ticket, and it includes a number of time reports that readily summarize the work done by your team. It even has a nice feature that lets you “clock in” when you start working on a ticket.

We have also added three more plugins based on your feedback. The Custom Roadmap plugin allows you to divide up the roadmap progress bars into additional categories. The Wiki Backlinks macro lets you add a list of backlinks to a wiki page. Finally, the Wysiwyg plugin provides a wysiwyg editor as an option when editing wiki pages. These plugins are all available from the Plugins tab on the Project Settings page.

Have a happy New Year from the Repository Hosting Team. We look forward to continue serving you in 2010!

It has been a while, so thanks for your patience. We found out that many of you are Agile software developers and today we are launching a new feature just for you. We have integrated the Agilo plugin into Trac and it is now available in every Repository Hosting account. We have also added a few additional plugins to make using Repository Hosting friendlier.

Why Agile Software Development?

In 2001 a group of well-known software developers wrote the Agile Manifesto to protest the inefficient and unrealistic practices that were common in the almost ubiquitous waterfall model of software development. Agile methods recognize that projects are unpredictable and that there is often a disconnect between the developers and the customers. It focuses on people and working software over processes and planning. Software is developed iteratively, in short 1 to 2 week sprints, at the end of which the team delivers working software that can be shown to the customer for feedback. So why Agile software development? It forces you and your team to deliver working software in small increments, allowing you to skip a lot of the tedious and time-consuming project planning, instead adjusting your plan as you go.

There is nothing worse then spending 4 months developing an extremely complex piece of software (which you are very proud of), only to find out it wasn’t exactly what the customer wanted. I know this firsthand, as I have had to throw away lots of code and have wasted many hours in the past, until I was introduced to the agile way of thinking.

For those of you who have never used agile methods, it’s easy to start by using the Agilo plugin.

Agilo

Agilo is a Trac plugin developed by agile42 and is available on the new Plugins tab on your Project Settings page. It provides you with all the necessary tools for Agile programming, including defining teams, creating requirements, user stories, tasks, and bugs, a product backlog, sprint backlog, and burndown chart. Full documentation can be found here.

You will also notice that we’ve improved the theme and styles of Trac. These changes were inspired by the excellent theme that comes with Agilo.

Additional Plugins

In addition to Agilo, we have also added three other plugins for you to use. The Download Releases plugin provides you with a Downloads tab in Trac where you can post releases of your software for others to download. The Ticket Deletions plugin allows you to permanently delete tickets (as opposed to merely closing them). This is useful in case you get spam tickets added to your project. Finally, the Table of Contents macro allows you to create customized TOCs for your pages. Please check the Plugins tab for more details.

If you have any feedback on these new features, or if there is a Trac plugin you would like to see added, please send us a quick email and let us know at support@repositoryhosting.com. Remember, at Repository Hosting there is only One Plan, One Price no matter how many new features we add.

Enjoy your new agile tools!

There is something undeniably powerful about branding that gets us excited and engaged. Today, we launch some really fun features, enabling you to fully brand your Repository Hosting account and projects.

Custom Colors and Logos

You can now specify custom colors and an optional logo for each of your projects as well as your account as a whole. If you modify the look of your account, all projects within your account will adopt the same changes by default. However, each individual project can also override these account defaults with their own logos or custom colors.

Domain Masking

Another feature that many of you have requested is the ability to mask your account behind your own domain names. This is now possible for both your account and for individual projects. For example, your account can now reside at a domain similar to the following:

http://projects.mycompany.com

A domain specified at the account level will be used by the entire account by default. However, specifying and visiting a domain at the project level automatically redirects the user to the project’s Trac instance, conveniently skipping over the Account Dashboard.

Setting up domain masking is easy. You need only to provide Repository Hosting with your desired domain(s) as well as make some small changes to your DNS (create a new CNAME record).

How do I get started?

All of the options and detailed instructions for both interface customization and domain masking can be found under the Branding section of account and project settings pages.

We hope you enjoy these updates. Let the branding begin!

Repositories, like Subversion and Git, are perfect for source code. But let’s face it, every project has certain files which just don’t feel like they belong in the source code repository. Who wants Word and Excel documents littering the source repository? Maybe you generate a lot of PSD’s that you just don’t want versioned because of the sheer space they would consume over time. We have an answer.

Today we are launching support for Shared Drives mounted via WebDAV. These drives share the same disk quota as the rest of your account, but files stored on them are not versioned. Additionally, these shared project drives can be easily mounted as a disk from any major operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) and files can be directly manipulated. This is especially helpful for project stakeholders who may find version control clients too complicated to use.

Every Repository Hosting project now already supports Shared Drives. Simply reference the “Access URLs” from your Account Dashboard for more information on how to grant privileges and start using them.

Changeset notifications via email are definitely handy, but we have found that there are often scenarios when having notification of commits can be useful in other contexts as well. It is now easy to receive notification of commits to your projects to a number of 3rd party services, including Twitter, Campfire and Basecamp.

In addition to these services, you can also enter a custom URL where Repository Hosting will POST essential information about the commit. This is especially helpful for those of you who are running continuous integration servers or other utilities that must be run after every commit.

To setup these services, simply visit your Project Settings page and enter the necessary credentials for any and all of the notifications you would like to receive.

Did you know that you can affect ticket status using your commit log messages?

If a project is setup to process commit messages (this can be changed from the Project Settings screen), the following commands entered into your commit log message have the potential to affect ticket status:

  close, closed, closes, fix, fixed, fixes
    The specified issue numbers are closed with the contents of this
    commit message being added to it. 
  references, refs, addresses, re, see 
    The specified issue numbers are left in their current status, but 
    the contents of this commit message are added to their notes. 

When processing the log message, commit messages are searched for text in the following form:

  command #1
  command #1, #2
  command #1 & #2 
  command #1 and #2

You can also have more then one command in a message. The following commands are supported. There is more then one spelling for each command, to make this as user-friendly as possible.

A fairly complicated example of what you can do is with a commit message of:

  Changed blah and foo to do this or that. Fixes #10 and #12, and refs #12.

This will close #10 and #12, and add a note to #12.

Enjoy!

Today, we have launched the ability to send emails directly into your Trac projects, automatically creating a new ticket for every email. Now, both your users and your development team can optionally contribute to the project without even having to login to the site!

You can create any number of email addresses within your account, each routing to a single project. Each address can specify ticket field values for every newly created ticket (i.e. owner, milestone, component, version, etc.). Email addresses can also be configured to be public (accepting email from anyone) or they can be limited to only accept mail from those users explicitly involved in the project.

All emails are created with the following format: address@subdomain.repositoryhosting.com.

Your users can certainly email directly to an address in this format. However, in many cases, it may be more appropriate to forward email to this address. For instance, let’s say you wanted to create an email bugs@myproduct.com. You could create this email using the mail server for your and then automatically forward all email sent to this address on to address@subdomain.repositoryhosting.com.

To configure email addresses for your account, simply visit the “Account Settings” page and click the “Incoming Emails” menu item.

It never ceases to amaze us how some of our competitors like to keep customer data out of the hands of the rightful owner: the customer! Many of our competitors actually charge you (or at minimum make it very difficult) to download project backups or dump file of your repositories. We find this inexcusable.

At Repository Hosting, we treat customers like we want to be treated. Thus, your data belongs to you, the customer, who should never feel locked in to Repository Hosting as its provider. To that end, we have some important new features to share with you.

Automated Backups

It is now possible to schedule automated backups for any of your projects on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. Whenever a backup is created, project administrators will immediately receive a notification and the backup can easily be downloaded from the web interface. You can, of course, still generate a backup manually at any time.

Amazon S3 Integration

Now, here comes the cool part. You can also provide Repository Hosting with the credentials for an Amazon Web Services account and we will automatically upload all project backups directly to an S3 bucket of your choosing. This guarantees that your data is always under your control when you need it, not when it is convenient for your hosting provider to surrender it.

That’s right. Automated backups, including Amazon S3 integration, are now available to all Repository Hosting accounts. We are committed to bringing you these and more top shelf features. Remember, at Repository Hosting there is only One Plan, One Price. Enjoy!

It has been just about a month since our official launch. Thank you for your overwhelming response to our approach to hosting your Git and Subversion repositories! We have had a tremendous number of signups and your quality feedback has already helped to shape our development.

One of the more common requests from you all has been support for the Trac XML-RPC plugin. We are glad to say that support for this plugin has now been deployed across all Repository Hosting projects.

Mylyn and Eclipse Integration

One of the most common uses of the Trac XML-RPC plugin is to integrate your Trac project directly into Eclipse using Mylyn. Mylyn makes it simple for you to manage your tickets from right within your IDE without ever having to task-switch out to your web browser. This is very cool for you Eclipse people.

Other Uses

Mylyn is only one of the potential ways to leverage the XML-RPC plugin. You can now access and manipulate all of the information stored in your Trac project programmatically from your language of choice. The possibilities for integration into your existing systems are endless.

To begin using the XML-RPC API, for Mylyn integration or otherwise, each accessing user (with the exception of project administrators) must be given the “XML_RPC” permissions. This can be done from the “Admin” tab from within any of your Trac projects.

For more information on how to use the XML-RPC plugin, along with libraries for specific languages, please visit the official page for the XML-RPC project.

Stay tuned. We have more to come very soon!