I’m pleased to announce that Tracks 1.7 has been released.

You can download this new stable version of Tracks here and an updated manual can be found on github and on the Tracks website.

What is new in 1.7:

* The included Rails version is updated to 2.2.2
* Tracks now supports recurring/repeating todos
* Cleanup of feed page and add feed for starred actions
* New interface to import an email / sms messages into Tracks (needs an email server on the same server as Tracks)
* New buttons to quickly defer an action 1 or 7 days
* Calendar view to review upcoming due actions, includes iCal feed to use in your calendar app (tested with Google Calendar, Evolution, Outlook 2007)
* You can now sort projects on number of active todos
* Support for OpenSearch. This means you can add a Tracks as a search provider in your webbrowser (tested on FF3 and IE7)
* We now allow users again to stay logged in on two devices at the same time
* Move site specific configuration out of environment.rb into site.yml for easier updating
* Bugfixes, including fixing OpenID

(for those using 1.7RC1/1.7RC2 we dropped the initial importer of yaml files because of its experimental state)

There are changes to the database in Tracks 1.7, and changes to the way you configure Tracks, so please migrate your database and redo your Tracks configuration.

In Tracks 1.7 the site specific configuration is moved from environment.rb into the new site.yml. This makes updating environment.rb much easier without you needing to set your site specific settings after each update. After you install/upgrade to Tracks 1.7 there will be no environment.rb.tmpl anymore. You will find an environment.rb which you can leave untouched. Just fill in your settings from your old environment.rb in the new site.yml. If you have made any other customizations to environment.rb in the past, you can put them in your own configuration file (for example, in my-config.rb) in config/initializers. Please let us know if you think they should be in site.yml.tmpl.

WARNING: if you update to 1.7 using git, your environment.rb will be overwritten. SO PLEASE MAKE BACKUPS

This release of 1.7 will include enhancements made by a lot new contributers (Jakub, Hans, Piotr, MHarris, Piglop, Farzy, Vitaliel, McVeat and Simon; I hope I didn’t forget anyone…). Thank you all for helping Tracks getting better every release. As ever particular thanks to Luke (for updating Tracks to 2.2.2) and to Eric Allen for lots of work on a many fronts, including the site.yml improvements!

Very many thanks to Reinier for his hard work yet again in getting this release together!

BSAG is quite busy currently, so in this case I’m going to do the announcement: I’m pleased to announce that Tracks 1.7RC2 has been released.

We have many improvements based on the feedback on RC1. We felt we should first do a RC2 to make sure all improvements did not introduce new regressions.

To download the this pre-release of version 1.7, please use github. (As soon as BSAG finds some time, she will post it on the getontracks.org home page and update the manual there.)

http://github.com/bsag/tracks/downloads/v1.7RC2

An updated manual can be found in http://github.com/bsag/tracks_manual/tree/master

Please help out to test this second pre-release to find any bugs before we release 1.7 in a few weeks

What was new in RC1:
  * The included Rails version is updated to 2.2.2
  * Tracks now supports recurring/repeating todos
  * Cleanup of feed page and add feed for starred actions
  * Initial importer of yaml files (still very EXPERIMENTAL; please send feedback on whether to include this; make backups while testing it)
  * New interface to import an email / sms messages into Tracks (needs an email server on the same server as Tracks)
  * New buttons to quickly defer an action 1 or 7 days
  * Calendar view to review upcoming due actions, includes iCal feed to use in your calendar app (tested with Google Calendar, Evolution, Outlook 2007)
  * You can now sort projects on number of active todos
  * Support for OpenSearch. This means you can add a Tracks as a search provider in your webbrowser (tested on FF3 and IE7)
  * Bugfixes, including fixing OpenID

New in RC2:
  * We now allow users again to stay logged in on two devices at the same time
  * Move site specific configuration out of environment.rb into site.yml for easier updating
  * Bugfixes, including the upgrade of has_many_polymorphs which will fix the problem of not being able to migrate from 1.6 because of non-existing recurring_todos table.

There are changes to the database (even between RC1 and RC2), and changes to the way you configure Tracks, so please migrate your database and redo your Tracks configuration.

In Tracks 1.7RC2 the site specific configuration is moved from environment.rb into the new site.yml. This makes updating environment.rb much easier without you needing to set your site specific settings after each update. After you install/upgrade Tracks 1.7RC2 there will be no environment.rb.tmpl anymore. You will find an environment.rb which you can leave untouched. Just fill in your settings from your old environment.rb in the new site.yml. If you have made any other customizations to environment.rb in the past, you can put them in your own configuration file (for example, in my-config.rb) in config/initializers. Please let us know it you think they should be in site.yml.tmpl.

WARNING: if you update to RC2 using git, your environment.rb will be overwritten. SO PLEASE MAKE BACKUPS

This release of 1.7 will include enhancements made by a lot new contributers (Jakub, Hans, Piotr, MHarris, Piglop, Farzy, Vitaliel, McVeat and Simon; I hope I didn’t forget anyone…). Thank you all for helping Tracks getting better every release. As ever particular thanks to Luke (for updating Tracks to 2.2.2) and to Eric Allen for lots of work on a many fronts, including the site.yml improvements! And since BSAG isn’t doing the announcement, I can thank BSAG for her work on Tracks and her work on the manual!

http://github.com/bsag/tracks_manual/tree/

I’ve now sorted out the formatting and organisation of the chapters sufficiently to publish it to the main Tracks site:

http://getontracks.org/doc/index.html

With webby and the appropriate settings in my Sitefile, all I need to do is issue the command:

webby deploy

to update all the files on the Tracks site, thus making it much easier than before to keep the manual up to date. I’ve changed the link for the ‘Manual’ navbar link on the main site to point to the new documentation.

In addition, with Prince XML installed, you can do the following on your local copy of the manual (with webby running) to generate a nice PDF file:

prince http://localhost:4331/printed/manual.html -o ~/Desktop/manual.pdf

I need to do a bit more CSS work to get the manual exactly how I want it to appear as a PDF, but it’s not bad. I’ve just uploaded it to my Bingodisk to replace the old manual, so you can have a look if you want:

http://bsag.bingodisk.com/public/files/manual.pdf

At the moment, the manual is more or less as it was before, with instructions for installing and upgrading Tracks, but I’d like to add other chapters on usage, tips and tricks etc.

  I was hoping to replace our Trac bug tracker with a custom solution run with ExpressionEngine (which runs this site), but importing existing tickets proved too much for my pre-Christmas brain! Instead, I imported all the old tickets into an Assembla space. Assembla offers a number of rather cool features, and will be easier for me to administer. You can find out how to use the site to submit tickets here.

1. I’m going to move from comment moderation on the Tracks site, to requiring membership to make comments. I’m hoping that this will be more effective in reducing spam, and will require less intervention from me as a moderator. To facilitate this, I’ve added a login form to the top of every page. The membership is the same as for the forum and wiki, so if you have already signed up for either of those, just sign in with your username and password. If you have uploaded an avatar, it should also show that avatar against your name if you make a comment. I’m also creating a bug tracker within the Tracks website, so you will also be able to use the same credentials to create tickets and comment on tickets that others have created.
2. I’ve got to move the entire Tracks site (and my own blog) to a new server over Christmas. In the process, I’ll have to disable the current site, Trac, forum and mailing list for a short while so that I don’t lose any data in the move. I’ll try to make that period as short as possible, but it depends on the process going smoothly! So if you see a notice that the site is down over the next few days, don’t be surprised. When it is finished, we should get faster page loading and experience much greater stability.
3. When this process is all over, Tracks will get its own, shiny new domain at long last: http://www.getontracks.org/ I’ll redirect the old site to the new one, but it would be a good idea to update your bookmarks when the process is finished too.

Wish me luck! It’s a bit of a complex process, and I’m fairly scared of messing things up!

I’m pleased to announce that Tracks 1.7RC has been released. This is a pre-release of version 1.7. Please help out to test this pre-release to find any bugs before we release 1.7 in a few weeks

What’s new:

  * The included Rails version is updated to 2.2.2
  * Tracks now supports recurring/repeating todos
  * Cleanup of feed page and add feed for starred actions
  * Initial importer of yaml files (still very EXPERIMENTAL; please send
feedback on whether to include this; make backups while testing it)
  * New interface to import an email / sms messages into Tracks (needs an
email server on the same server as Tracks)
  * New buttons to quickly defer an action 1 or 7 days
  * Calendar view to review upcoming due actions, includes iCal feed to
use in your calendar app (tested with Google Calendar, Evolution, Outlook
2007)
  * You can now sort projects on number of active todos
  * Support for OpenSearch. This means you can add a Tracks as a search
provider in your webbrowser (tested on FF3 and IE7)
  * Bugfixes, including fixing OpenID

There are changes to the database, and a few changes to config/environment.rb.tmpl, so please migrate your database and copy the template file and merge your personalisations with it. More upgrade instructions are in the manual in the /doc directory.

This release of 1.7 will include enhancements made by a lot new contributers (Jakub, Hans, Piotr, MHarris and Simon). Thank you all for helping Tracks getting better every release. As ever particular thanks to Luke (for updating Tracks to 2.2.2) and to Reinier for masses of work on a lot of fronts, not least in making it extremely easy for me to announce and distribute this release!

I saw that #tracks on freenode was still available so I registered it.  Feel free to join.

http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/news/comments/tracks-moves-to-github/

http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/downloads/comments/tracks-15/

I’ve also updated the home page, the manual and screenshots for the new release.

Have fun!

What’s new:
* The included Rails version is updated to 2.0.2
* You can now search the contents of todos, projects and notes (thanks, Jeffrey Gipson!)
* Improvements to the mobile view, including a few iPhone specific improvements for those of you lucky enough to have an iPhone
* A few bug fixes

An important caveat is that OpenID support is broken in 1.6. The fix is a bit complicated because of changes to the ruby-openid gem, so we wanted to get 1.6 out before fixing it. If you depend on OpenID support, we’d advise waiting until the next release. There are no changes to the database, but quite a few changes to config/environment.rb.tmpl, so please copy the template file and merge your personalisations with it.

Many thanks to Luke, Reinier and Jeffrey for their hard work on this release!