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
Notice on CodePlex that a new project search UI appears once you make an initial search for a project, either by using the project search box itself or by clicking on a tag. There are some interesting new search enhancements and filters, and I'm going to list them all out here to give the full picture of everything that has been done:
1. The search results now have the target keyword highlighted in yellow, for quick identification within the result set. Notice that all related tags are also included in the result set, and any which contain the target keyword are also color highlighted.
2. You can now filter your search to find ONLY release quality projects by simply checking a checkbox that excludes project releases, which are still in development.
3. There is now both a 'Simple Search' and 'Advanced Search', and you can easily toggle between the two, by simply clicking the new hyperlink provided to the right of the search input box. The new Advanced Search feature allows you to filter results by both project maturity and license type. These features were added in direct response to requests from the community.
4. Notice the new dropdown control that allows you to further filter your search by the following parameters:
- Relevance
- Current Release
- Downloads
- Page Views
- Project Start Date
- Ratings
- Title
5. The rating of the project's current default release now also appears in the search results (with pretty gold stars), the rating being based on cumulative voting by registered members of the CodePlex community. The release names are hyperlinked, so you can go directly to them, instead of having to go to the project home page first.
6. There have been several perf improvements made to project search as well. We keep looking for ways to optimize and this release incorporates a new algorithm, which when used with the new search filters, promises to give the user far more relevant results. Try it out and compare to the last time you used it.
We're interested in continuing to improve on search moving forward, and your feedback is critical in helping us to drill down on the areas where things can be made better, so please let us know about your search experiences, either in the discussion forum dedicated to improving the CodePlex site, or the CodePlex Issue Tracker. Note that if you log a work item in the Issue Tracker, it becomes an action item for the CodePlex team and will gain increased priority as more of the community votes for it over time.
One of the new features we just released on CodePlex is a web tree view browser for looking at files under source control. This makes for a much improved experience for users who view code in the projects on the site. The visual presentation of source code files uses syntax highlighting with specific color matching to keywords, so that what you see is very similar to how files look in Visual Studio under its default display settings. Click the 'Expand all' link to open up the tree view and see the next level of nested files under the top level namespaces:
This view below is of a C# file after expanding out the tree control. You can now quickly navigate between and drill down into the exact files in a changeset you are interested in. The code is, of course, fully copy and pastable, but notice the new feature addition that when you view a source file now you get a unique URL for that specific file based on a unique ID for that page at the end of the URL, so you can bookmark it for easy reference when you want to return to it later on.
ex. http://www.codeplex.com/xunit/SourceControl/changeset/view/26430#141127
Let us know what you think of the new functionality and please offer any ideas for improving things by submitting a work item on the CodePlex Issue Tracker: http://www.codeplex.com/CodePlex/WorkItem/AdvancedList.aspx
