As of yesterday, OpenHatch 0.11.11 is live on the website, and tagged in git. It includes some substantial changes.

This month saw some major overhaul in the backend:

• We stopped using “buildout.” We were using this to help developers install the dependencies required by the app. Now we simply bundle all our pure-Python dependencies using a vendor/ directory (as described in the Kitsune documentation), and the dependencies that are not pure-Python are optional. This means that Windows and Mac OS users can easily get the code and start modifying it and contributing.
• We switched away from the old, slow, unreliable “bugtrackers” framework that we wrote, and toward the newer, Twisted-based “bugimporters” system for downloading bug data. Props to Jack Grigg for building the initial version of this.
• We stopped using the Haystack search system for the /people/ pages, making them much faster. (Full-text search was not appropriate for the kinds of queries we are doing there.) I enjoyed the thrill of deleting hundreds of lines of code from our codebase that interfaced between Haystack and us.
• Jule Slootbeek implemented a much-asked-for interface to interact with prospective helpers on a project and mark them as having been contacted. This feature is not deployed on the live site yet (disabled in settings.py) because we haven’t implemented the final templates for it yet.

Users will notice the site being much faster, and new contributors will notice that getting a development environment working is reliable and speedy (about ten minutes).

You can read the full release plan on the wiki and a list of the bugs we closed.

We had two sprints during this release. The release contains patches from Vivek Shrivastava (based on work by aviendhaSL), Jill A. Johnson, Jason Michalski, Jule Slootbeek, Jessica McKellar, and me (Asheesh Laroia). Of those, this is the first month that Jason, Jule, and Jill have patches that have landed. Welcome aboard!