No, it’s not just half the answer. I think we’re much farther down the way than that ☺ while there are still improvements planned, under development, and to come, we’ve gone a long ways from 4.5 based Evolvis platform releases.

I have just upgraded all tarent-internal instances of Evolvis, as well as the public evolvis.org forge, to a new version of the FusionForge based EvolvisForge as well as MediaWiki and its extensions.

There are several new extensions, almost all of them enabled by default. You can see a tech demo of these at https://evolvis.org/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/evolvis/index.php/PluginDemo (which will automatically show you an English- or German language version depending on your web browser’s preferences). The extensions are:

• Math
• Cite
• Collection
• CreateBox
• Footnote
• GraphViz
• ImageMap
• InputBox
• LanguageSelector
• NewestPages
• News
• PageCSS
• ParserFunctions
• Polyglot
• RSS_Reader
• SpecialCite
• SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi

The MediaWiki extensions are “driven” (configured) by the forge semi-automatically, for example RSS_Reader uses a per-project (forge group) cache directory instead of disabling the cache (which needed to be done for the Debian package, since the default installation does not have the luxury of a directory writable for the Apache user). The configuration closely matches the “old-style” (JH) Wiki integration that has been done for Evolvis 4.5 previously.

Further changes include a fair number of bugfixes to the code, theme, wiki, extensions (fed upstream), and XHTML compliance. We know there are still enough bugs to keep us busy for a while, but you might notice some improvements; others are hidden but shorten the Apache error_log noticeably ☺

To further summarise from the developer/package management system changelog the (non-bugfix) changes from the last version include:

• reduced space requirements by using the xz compressor instead of gzip for nightly Subversion backups
• give forge (group/project and site) admins more permissions in the Wiki by default
• Konqueror users have clickable sftp:// links in the places where SFTP/manual file upload can be used
• displaying filenames of uploaded files, including rules for them, has been improved
• there are now two automatic mailing lists (for newly created groups/projects): unixname-commits (where every member with commit rights will be added automatically) and unixname-discuss (where every member will be added automatically); of course there’s still the option to unsubscribe or, for non-members, to subscribe (a new Mailman integration is being worked on)
• Mailman list administrator passwords can now be (re-)set from the forge (by group/project or site admins); be careful to tell your co-admins the new password though…
• new values for PM (Tasks) status fields
• the ability to copy a task to another subproject
• customisable display for the Tasks area

Notable bugfixes:

• the SCM URLs now always use the correct hostname
• help window pop-ups are working again
• Evolvis can now almost fully be used with PHP 5.3 on Debian unstable (although we are still formally targetting Debian Lenny (with select backports and custom packages) specifically)
• font sizes (in the forge and the wiki) are finally consistent
• slight performance improvements

The time tracking area in Tasks has been disabled, since there is a company-internal tool doing the same, with an Evolvis integration being developed.

We hope you enjoy the latest installment of the Evolvis platform!

-- Thorsten Glaser, for the tarent Evolvis task forge, FusionForge and Mediawiki