Late at night on April 30, I deployed the latest release of OpenHatch. Version 0.11.04 is tagged in Gitorious. It was a frantic release with only two weeks of time. We got a lot done, thanks to a really active team with lots of new people!

Here are some highlights of what changed:

• Jack Grigg continued to improve the code that downloads bugs from other projects’ trackers (to display them in /search/). When we download bugs, we now do it in parallel thanks to Twisted.
• As his first contribution, Knut Hühne improved the CSS on the bug tracker. Paul Bakulich further cleaned it up.
• Asheesh and Jack created an extremely basic web interface for managing a project’s bug trackers. It will serve as the basis for a UI that we will recommend people use to have us index their project’s bugs.
• Mark Freeman worked on a training mission to teach git, and Paul Bakulich polished it up well enough to be deployed.
• First time contributor Claudio Mezzalma created a new robots.txt so that people’s dev servers don’t get indexed by search engines.
• We improved the build system: Jessica Ledbetter (for her first patch) corrected the imports so that we can find PIL even in a virtualenv. Paul added Subversion to our list of dependencies to pull in using apt-get.
• Jessica Ledbetter implemented a totally new front page, making the site more consistent. You should actually give that a look: log in, and notice that the layout doesn’t change and the page is much more well-organized.
• We upgraded to Django 1.2 and were careless with CRSF_TOKENS on a bunch of forms; Knut Hühne helped us out of that predicament with an awesome patch.
• First-time contributor Filipovskii Off wrote code that lets us keep track of if you have ever completed a mission, even if you reset it. Also, Jack reviewed and deployed the patch, his first such cycle, made possible by him being on the Login Team.
• First-time contributor Vivek fixed our use of Google Maps so that we now always use the SSL-based API.

This release announcement was not shipped on time. As project lead, mea culpa. Thanks go out to Paul Bakulich for helping me write it!

We were lucky to have some new contributors, as mentioned above. These are the people whose commits made the release possible:

I wrote that we shipped, “bugs and all.” After deploying the git training mission, I tried it out with a more critical eye and discovered that it could use some clean-up in the interface. First thing on May 1, I filed a flurry of issues on the bug tracker. We will hopefully close those by the end of May; we could use your help, if you’re reading this! The best ways to find us are the #openhatch IRC channel on irc.freenode.net and the Devel mailing list. Stop by and say hello.

This month, we could especially use people who like thinking through user interfaces and making mockups we can implement. We can always use JavaScript and Python programmers, people who like doing graphic design, and people who like writing documentation.

(Image credit: “Ladybug Love” by Tony Koloski.)