The Bug Genie 3.2 is now available

26th April, 2012 – The Bug Genie team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the final 3.2 release. The Bug Genie 3.2 is the second feature release for the 3.x series, which – in addition to fixing a vast number of issues since The Bug Genie 3.1, also features hugely improved project management, file releases, incoming email support, bulk issue updates, interactive planning mode and a brand new look and feel.

The team has been working hard the last few weeks and months to tidy up this release so you can enjoy a whole new suite of features. With almost no area of The Bug Genie untouched, this release is the most awesome yet.

Following the release of our final 3.2 version we will also be launching our hosted issue tracker offering. If you're interested in participating in an early-access program for the hosted issue tracker, drop us a line at hosted@thebuggenie.com. If you just want to download the new version, read on!

  • More pretty than lipstick on a pig

    Our new theme provides a much clearer appearance, with our new 'metallic' look. In with this, a brand new font makes everything much more readable - as well as better supporting international characters.

  • Be lazy, let emails do the hard work for you

    Create, manage and close issues all from the comfort of your email client, with the new Incoming Mail feature. You can even add comments and proceed through the workflow.

  • Have your project your way

    You can now choose what you want on your project dashboard, with full widgeting support. Choose from a wide variety of content, such as downloads, recent issues and statistics, and place it in the order you want.

  • Issues which look finished

    Issue pages have gained a huge pile of style improvements, now wasting much less space and making it easier to see the information you need. And not just that, scroll down and the header and workflow magically moves with you; so you can always get hold of these important actions no matter what you're doing!

  • Release easy, release often

    The Bug Genie's Releases feature has been given a huge boost, and now support file releases. Easily add files using The Bug Genie's upload facility, and make them easily visible for all users on your project dashboard.

Rock solid, versatile, awesome performance

Stability, predictability and consistency has been a primary focus in the 3.2 development run. This has lead to

  • A slick, new design: Our new theme gives you an even more visually pleasing and visually consistent experience than you're used to. The theme also makes sure UI elements are easily recognizable, making it a lot easier to find the feature you're looking for, when you need it.
  • Improved backend performance: The database backend layer have seen a huge improvement and upgrade. Working together with the improvements and enhancements in the Caspar framework project has brought a much faster database backend, with support for advanced querying, relations and indexing. Backported from the Caspar framework is also a much more configurable setup and configuration tools, making it easier to set up The Bug Genie with alternate configurations.
  • Caching and speedup: In 3.2, all available caching features have been turned on, bringing you a much, much faster experience. Pages load faster, navigating is quick and painless, and we've improved responsiveness and feedback in all areas. No waiting!

New features in The Bug Genie 3.2

Awesome planning
Replacing the agile-only "scrum" mode, the new planning mode lets you create milestones, assign issues, manage your backlog and bulk-update issues, all in one page. Drag and drop to organise issues and milestones, estimate and edit straight on the planning page.
New and improved search tools
We redesigned the search page so it is now easier to build search queries, and the results are presented better to give more attention to the search results. New search filters, such as "posted by", "posted at", "assigned to", "last updated at" and "owned by" lets you search for issues within or outside timeframes, and related to teams or users.
Log in with OpenID
Having to register for another service can be a barrier for bug reporting. With built-in OpenID-support, users can use their existing Google, Wordpress, Blogger, Yahoo (and several other) accounts to auto-login and not have to worry about a username or password at all. You can even add multiple OpenID accounts to existing user accounts to make your own logins even easier.
Redesigned notification settings
Many users were complaining about the notification settings being a bit hard to "get right". We've now changed the user notification settings from a checkbox list to a selection between "silent", "recommended" and "verbose". Advanced mode is still available if you want to tweak your notification settings manually.
Interactive statistics
We've replaced our statistics imaging libraries with an interactive, javascript-based imaging library that lets us create interactive graphs and statistic visualizations.
VCS Integration... Improved!
VCS Integration has had a huge overhaul, and it is now much easier to set up and use! No more complex syntax - we can pick up issues using the same, more versatile, syntax as our Wiki parser, and the same flexibility from our incoming email support is also available in VCS commits. Setting up is now much easier, with more flexible support for setting repository browser URLs - now you can use ones we don't support; and a new commit list for projects is available - optionally showing even commits which don't affect issues! Issue commit boxes are now much improved, and support changes which affect no files, and our internal code is now much more robust, and as a final extra, for those of you using repositories that have Git-style branches, the correct URLs can be generated from branch data stored from each commit. This also gives you a little branch indicator next to each commit.
Faster dashboards
We've rewritten our dashboards, making it widgets-based. The new dashboard widgets also supports loading content after the page has been shown, which means you will no longer have to wait for a long time just because you have a big search on your dashboard.
Bulk actions
Both on the redesigned issue result pages and the new planning mode, bulk actions are available. Update statuses, apply workflow transitions or assign issues to existing (or on-the-fly created) milestones on any number of isses you select. Managing issues have never been easier.
Project hierarchy and archiving
Set up your projects in the hierarchy they follow, with brand new support for subprojects. And, for when you reach the end of some contracted work, you can archive a project to hide it away, but keep it available - all locked down and preserved so you don't get any unwanted changes!
Localization which speaks to you
Two of our most long-standing localization bloopers are fixed in this release, the timezone you choose is now the timezone you get*! UTF characters are now guaranteed to appear correctly*, and as an added bonus we have fixed foreign characters in our fonts and graphs, so all the info you need is available for all your users.

* Previous times may become incorrect as a result of our bugfix, database changes are necessary for both these fixes. An upgrade switch is available for smaller installations, and a separate task will be released after 3.2 to fix this issue on bigger installations.
Search better with better Search
We want you to find the issues you need to fix quickly and efficiently. So, we added a number of fantastic improvements to our search module - aimed at helping you find the info you need. Table column sorting is now available on all search tables (as well as Wiki tables), so you can prioritize in any way you want; and you can also choose which columns you want on your results.

Known issues

  • The Bug Genie 3.1.0 - 3.1.5 had a bug that caused it to write "3.0" to the "installed" file. This means the upgrader will think you are running version 3.0 and will not let you upgrade. Edit the "installed" file, so it says "3.1" where it says "3.0", and it will let you upgrade as expected.

Upgrade notes

You can upgrade to version 3.2 from version 3.1.8. If you're running an earlier version of The Bug Genie, you need to upgrade to version 3.1.8 before continuing.
Before starting an upgrade, you must read through the upgrade instructions in the FAQ, here: TheBugGenie:FAQ.

Get it now!

The Bug Genie 3.2 can be downloaded from our download page.

If you want to upgrade your existing installation, please read through the UPGRADE file included in the release for information on how to upgrade your existing installation.

For more installation and upgrade instructions, please refer to the FAQ