Preview release 2: Circle Blvd 1.6

This second preview release for Circle Blvd 1.6 introduces an improved story-insert experience.

Adding new stories has always been a bit awkward, as stories were always added to the top of the list, resulting in a list that's in the opposite order of intention. Now the story-insert panel will move down as tasks are entered, so it will be more intuitive to make the intended order.

This release brings back the comment functionality that was missing in preview 1, and fixes a number of long-standing issues.

We've removed checklists from this release. None of our active users utilize checklists, so we'll migrate them to the new architecture at a later time.

No more features will be added or removed between this second 1.6 preview release and the final draft of 1.6.0. Between now and then we'll be completing the migration to a Vue-based architecture.

Preview release: Circle Blvd 1.6

In Circle Blvd 1.6 we are migrating from AngularJS to Vue.js, and introducing webpack into our build.

The move to Vue.js brings performance and stability to the web client. The Circle Blvd project has been plagued since the very early days with display artifacts and jumbled task lists related to the AngularJS architecture. These have largely (perhaps entirely) been resolved with the move to Vue.js.

Introducing Vue.js has pushed us to finally bring a modern build tool into our project. We are going with webpack, as it is the clear leader for building JavaScript web projects in 2017.

The migration to Vue.js has been centered around the Story List, and more work is to be done to complete the migration. A few features have not made the migration (notably, email notifications, and a few comment-related features) but these will be appearing soon.

Please enjoy this preview release, and thank you for supporting the Circle Blvd project.

Introducing Slack integration

Circle Blvd can now send messages to a Slack channel on certain activities:

• Task creation
• Most status updates
• Comments

Where the messages go are configured through Slack by adding an incoming webhook. Set the webhook URL for your circle on the admin page.

Fixes in this release:

• Arrow keys no longer break after a task is removed
• Task URLs now go to the task they specify
• UX improvements around opening tasks on small screens

UX release: Moving and selecting tasks

With this release, we're changing how tasks are moved and selected (and opened). Tasks can now be moved by dragging anywhere on the task, not just on the square on the right-hand side. Multi-select of task blocks is now done by holding shift, like one can do with a file explorer in Windows, Linux, or MacOS.

Double clicking on a task opens it, as it did in the last release; however, now a single click followed by a delay followed by another single click (on the same task) no longer opens that task.

These changes were made with the intention of reducing the amount of surprise in how the UI operates.

Docs release

Pare down the tour and the welcome / walkthrough to the essentials.

Officially say that we require Node v6 to run, as that is the current LTS release of Node.js.

Patch release: Introducing list meta

This release is a major step toward long-term stability, with the introduction of list-meta documents. The list-meta docs are responsible for story order, and allow us to move a story with one write to the database, allowing us to migrate away from our ad-hoc transaction system, which has been the source of instability issues for a few years.

This release is compatible with all existing Circle Blvd clients, as the client API has not changed.

This release also fixes the checklist functionality, which was broken in the 1.5.10 release.

Introducing arbitrary insert

With this release, one can now insert tasks at arbitrary points in the list, and not just at the top. This release also includes a $10 subscription plan.

Dev release: Split up story list directive

This release starts to break up the massive spStoryList into smaller modules, preparing the way for improving the feature set of the story list.

There is no new functionality, except in the build system, which now only sends out notifications if the build status changes from passing to failing.

Dev release: Add Travis-CI build

Integrate with Travis-CI for build monitoring, and update most of our dependencies in npm. This release is meant to prepare the codebase for moving away from Node 0.10, as it is nearing its end of life.

Dev release: Extract database config

This release is primarily for developers. It takes steps toward a more modular database-config setup. It also removes the dependency on EJS, so now all templates use Jade.

With the better database config situation, now all of the tests can be run at the same time, without worrying about database squashing.