You may notice that rt.cpan.org looks a little different than usual. Or maybeyou first noticed the unusual zip with which it loaded. I'm happy to announce that we just upgraded it from RT 3.8.10 to the latest and greatest RT 4.0.11 released today! Along with the upgrade, we took the time over the past few weeks to fix some common complaints and add a few new features to make the service even better to use:
- Autocomplete for distribution and module names: No more typing "LWP::UserAgent" only to realize you needed to type "libwww-perl" instead. The module names are made possible by MetaCPAN's awesome API. Thanks to Moritz Onken for moving the autocomplete endpoint to the API server.
- Preferred bug tracker information displayed prominently: If you set a bugtracker in your distribution's metadata, rt.cpan.org will point visitors to your preferred service (see an example). Many thanks to Ian Norton (IDN) for contributing the patches. He details how to set bugtracker info for a variety of build tools over on his blog.
- Tickets no longer auto-open when they are marked patched, resolved, or rejected. Auto-open still happens when a ticket is new or stalled. Public users logged in with Bitcard or OpenID can manually re-open tickets if necessary. Our great group of beta testers all agreed this was much more desireable behaviour!
- Code, patches, and test files now always display nicely when attached to messages and don't lose formatting
- Customizing your queue list on the homepage for PAUSE authors is back. If you have comaint on a lot of distributions, you can now trim down that list to what you care about.
- Quote folding in conversations (à la Gmail)
- A mobile-friendly site for PAUSE authors — just access the site on your mobile device or visit https://rt.cpan.org/m
- Logging in is better about returning you back to where you were
- More PAUSE-only links seamlessly redirect to their public equivalents
The site is also hosted on speedy new hardware thanks, as always, to the Perl.org ops team. With the server move, the backend infrastructure was all tidied up, and that will make it much easier to safely and quickly deploy updates in the future.
Happy bug tracking!