Well, here it is, CodePlex has gotten a new facelift, which has been the result of countless hours of design discussion and sifting through feedback provided by users of the site who have felt strongly enough to give their opinion about how they think things should be and we are hoping that we've delivered an experience which most everyone will find acceptable. The neon green is gone! so now it won't seem as if every day is like St. Patrick's Day on the site. You'll notice that a lot of bells and whistles have not been added nor graphical fluff, the reason being that the team has always been of the opinion that CodePlex isn't about the home page, it's about the projects themselves and unlike Frank Lloyd Wright's approach to the design of the Guggenheim Museum on 5th Ave. in New York, the intention here was NOT to try and outshine the content we are hosting, but rather to simply provide the necessary functionality for site users to interact effectively with it. The site home page remains visually minimalistic from a design perspective and continues to occupy a supporting role for the real stars on the stage: the projects themselves.
Bug Fixing and Perf Optimization In addition to the new site home page, a lot of bug fixing went into this release and those efforts were occurring in parallel with several data center upgrades needed to improve site operations moving forward. We've had some major successes in improving usability and optimizing performance and we'll be continuing to work on these things. Notice how much quicker it is to navigate through work items now - both Basic and Advanced views. Some more work needs to be done, but great strides have been made - test it out and see for yourself.
New Project Subdomain URLs
A new feature was added where project owners can point others to their projects using the more personalized CNAME project subdomain URL format. Here is an example:
http://xunit.codeplex.com/
Right now, it only works to point to the project home page and will revert to the usual CodePlex domain in the URL when you click on any of the other tabs in your project, but support will be coming for the other project areas in the future.Size Limit for Release File Uploads Has Been Increased
The size limit for creating individual files inside project releases has now been increased to 250 MB. This means that you can have multiple files inside a single release, each of which can be up to 250 MB now. This will help out the projects with large file requirements. Currently most projects won't need this kind of a limit, but it's there, if they do. Anyways, we hope you like the new changes, and as always we'd like to hear your thoughts about them. Here is the URL for the Discussions forum dedicated to conversations about the CodePlex site itself. Even brief comments can carry weight there: http://www.codeplex.com/CodePlex/Thread/List.aspx