Oops! We haven’t been keeping you up-to-date with release announcements. The last one was in June. The OpenHatch community has been quite active since then; we’ve been giving presentations, organizing events, and working on a new structure. We’ve even been pushing the web app forward and doing software releases. We just didn’t write announcements.

Well, I like announcements. So now seems like a good time to talk about 0.11.06!

June’s 0.11.06: Web forum, caching, and mission cleanup

The big news on the backend for June was the introduction of new web forum to help people chat about OpenHatch in a place that isn’t a mailing list. Mark Freeman took the time to review a great number of forum apps, and we settled on Vanilla. I (Asheesh) wrote the login integration code that lets you use your OpenHatch account to log in.

The big news, design-wise, is that Paul Bakulich implemented UI changes to the training missions so you can visually track your progress through them. The check-marks are new, and if you have not yet completed the step, it will be greyed out:

We also began the slow process of moving our web hosting to the famous Open Source Lab at OSU. Huge thanks to them for offering a virtual server to us!

These people contributed commits to the release:

There were a lot of little improvements that deserve a mention:

• Tiago Sousa (Mkman) adjusted the text on the account creation page to be more clear.
• Paul Bakulich fixed the /projects/ URL to redirect to /+projects/ and uncovered some backstory about why the + marks are part of our URLs.
• Paul also tidied up the display of collaborators on people’s profile pages and made the profile editor UI more responsive. His changes to the git training mission backend fixed user reports of unreliability.
• Jessica McKellar fixed a typo in the git training mission and began to push patches and deploy code as part of her new membership in the Login Team.
• Travis Beatty changed buildout.cfg to list specific versions of our Python dependencies.
• AFMac fixed the diffpatch mission so that it detects UTF-8 byte order mark characters left by some Windows text editors, and warns you. This change also introduces a unit test.

As always, you can read more about the milestone by looking at the bugs closed and the openhatch-0.11.06 tag in git.