What's New?

Welcome to the What's New page for Google Project Hosting. Here you'll find descriptions of our latest improvements to our collaborative development environment.

March 2015

• Google Code will be shut down at the end of 2015. See Bidding farewell to Google Code.
• The Google Code Exporter launched, providing an easy way to export Google Code projects to GitHub.

May 2013

• Downloads functionality has been removed for new projects.

January 2013

• Google Code Search functionality was removed for most projects.

December 2012

• Literal string search for Issue Tracker when using “ “ ( Issue 5313 )

October 2012

• Use the correct MIME type for serving *.xhtml pages ( Issue 28522 )

August 2012

• Searching for an exact issue label now works correctly ( Issue 28311 )
• Bug fix for incorrect expansion of groups addresses when sending email for blocked-on/blocking updates ( Issue 28391 )

July 2012

• Issue searches for URI’s now generates the proper results ( Issue 28341 )
• Issue status reclassification now sets/unsets the closed_on timestamp ( Issue 28327 )
• Issue search result counts are now accurate up to 10.000, above 10.000 rounding is applied for aesthetic reasons ( Issue 28312 )

June 2012

• Fixed Blocked On/Blocking Issue not showing proper backlinks ( Issue 28258 ). Affected issues will be fixed soon.
• Added Label Subscriptions. Clicking on the new "Subscriptions" link in the issue tracker will bring you to a form where you can list labels you want to receive issue change notifications for. You will receive email whenever an issue with that label is changed.
• Released new issue search backend with increased scalability. If you see any weird results please open an issue at http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/entry.
• Fixed sorting on MergedInto column ( Issue 5813 )
• Support for Stars >X searches. stars:X will now search for star_count >= X while stars=X will search for star_count = X ( Issue 1210 )
• Proper cross-project issue search, you can now add project=project-name-1,project-name-2 into your search queries to search across multiple projects ( Issue 5263 ).
• The opened-before, opened-after and other related operators now support today as a value instead of today-0 :).
• Not searches with multiple values now work again ( Issue 26415 )
• Made sorting of empty values consistent across the board ( Issue 28281 )

May 2012

• Removed pending code reviews request from the source list browser
• Ongoing backend optimalizations

April 2012

Codesearch

• We added Codesearch for Mercurial Repositories.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed pathological email handling in our inbound email processing.
• We fixed email obfuscation logic for email notifications.

Issue tracker UI

The "New Issue" button now warns you if clicking it would discard existing changes.

Social features

We've added +1 buttons to project home pages and Google+ badges to user profile pages.

March 2012

Anti-spam measures

We have upgraded our captchas and improved our spam detection capabilities.

Allow non-project members to specify labels when creating a new issue

There is a checkbox in the issue tracker settings that, when checked, allows users who are not project members to set labels when entering new issues. See also  Issue 9269 .

January 2012

Moving issues

You can now move issues from one project to another, e.g. if they have been filed in the wrong location.

November 2011

Mercurial bookmark support

We now support Mercurial pushable bookmarks.

October 2011

Repository deletion support

For projects with multiple Git or Mercurial repositories, you can now mark repositories as deleted. See  issue 4061 .

September 2011

Faster issue tracker searches in large projects

We made a series of changes that sped up issue searches and the issue detail page in large projects such as chromium. At this point, there's at least a 30% speedup already, and more optimizations are in the works.

Mercurial closed branch display

Closed branches in Mercurial repositories are now marked as such. See  issue 3103 .

August 2011

Refinements to the issue preview window UX

Users reported that the issue preview window opened too often when they were not intending to access it. We addressed this by adding a delay that helps differentiate between an intentional hover and an unintentional mouse-over. But, in the intentional hover case, the preview window is fully displayed just as fast as it always was.

July 2011

Git support

We now support Git, along with Mercurial and Subversion. See the announcement and the FAQ.

Better repository urls

You can now clone a Mercurial or Git project directly from the project home page, e.g. "hg clone http://code.google.com/p/go/".

Issue quick-edit commands, and preview-on-hover user preference

Now there's a faster, more command-like and keyboard-oriented way to triage issues. Read all about it in the code blog post.

June 2011

Issue summary prefixes

Our issue tracker now retains prefixes in the summary of an issue template. E.g., if you define an issue template with the summary "[REGRESSION] something that used to work", then when a user enters an issue using that template, they will still see "[REGRESSION]" in the summary field after they click to edit it.

+1 Button

You can now add the +1 button to wiki pages and to project home pages, using the <g:plusone/> tag. See WikiSyntax for details.

May 2011

Option to send an issue change notification email or not

The main point of an issue tracking system is to coordinate the action of multiple people, so usually you will want to notify interested users whenever an issue comment is made. However, some changes are really just house-keeping or notes to yourself. So, it is now possible for project members to suppress the normal issue change notification email by unchecking the "Send email" box when posting an issue comment.

Better "Switch Accounts" page

When you use Multiple Sign-In, sometimes you are signed in to one account that has permission to view a restricted issue, but your active account does not. We now show the Switch Accounts interstitial page in more cases, and the page itself has an easier-to-see link to sign in to another account.

April 2011

More details in issue change notifications and update bubbles

Previously, we always showed "..." in user names in issue change notifications. Now, when you edit an issue owner or the issue CC list, you will see the unobscured name of that user, if you have permission to see it.

March 2011

More labels and more filter rules

Yep, some projects categorize issues using more than 15 labels per issue, so now that limit has been raised to 24. Also, some projects were nearing the limit of 100 filter rules, so that limit has been increased to 200.

New member editing UI

Project owners can now add and remove project members on the "People" subtab of the "Project Home" tab. Project owners can change a member's role on the People detail page for that user.

Individual project committers and contributors can now remove themselves from a project by visiting the "People" subtab, clicking through to their own detail page, and clicking "Remove member".

File creation and upload

Project committers and owners can now create new files under version control via their web browser. Just click the "Create" or "Upload" link in the source browsing directory contents pane.

February 2011

Updated wiki page style

Updated the CSS style for wiki pages for readability. See WikiSyntax for the style changes.

January 2011

Edit button for source files

Added the ability to edit source code files directly in the browser. Just look for the “edit file” link on source browsing file pages. As you edit the file, you can preview the diff of your changes so you know exactly what you are committing. If you don’t have commit privileges to the project, instead of committing your changes, you can file your changes as a patch in the project’s issue tracker. See blog for more detail.

December 2010

Refreshed the UI across the site

Updated the style for the website. See blog for more detail.

Apache Extras

Created a separate instance of Project Hosting specifically for ASF-related projects.

September 2010

Comments by project members highlighted

Now when you view issues, wiki pages, or code reviews, comments made by project members will have the words "project member" in front of the user name. This helps to identify the more authoritative comments and responses in what can sometimes be very long lists of comments.

New links to reset repos

Users have always been able to reset their repos via the "Checkout" page, but now they can also do it via the "Administer" > "Source" subtab.

July 2010

Live wiki preview

Create or edit a wiki page, press the "Preview" button, and keep on editing. Notice anything awesome happening? Yep, the preview now updates every couple of seconds as you type.

Suggestions for search terms

Now when you search issues, downloads, or wiki pages, there is an auto-complete menu that helps you enter special search terms. For example, type "med" and you will see an auto-complete option for "Priority=Medium".

Auto-complete for project labels

When creating a project or editing the labels of an existing product, we now show auto-complete options for some of our most commonly used labels. This helps save you keystrokes, but more importantly it helps everyone use the exact same label spelling for things like programming language names or widely used libraries.

Google Analytics integration with downloads

Whenever a user now clicks to download a file through the web UI, a Google Analytics event is triggered. This will help project owners keep track of how many times the download was clicked to start downloading. For more information see the Download FAQ.

June 2010

View link for textual issue attachments

If someone files an issue or adds an issue comment and attaches a text file to it, you can now view that file in the web-browser. The file is presented in the same way that we view source files, with line numbers and syntax highlighting for many languages.

Revised issue and source code word-wrapping

Now, if you enter long-lines in an issue description or comment, they will be rendered as long lines in the user's browser, but still retain indentation and other spacing. Likewise, long source code lines are now word-wrapped to the browser window width rather than causing the page to have a horizontal scrollbar. (Note: IE users will see something close to the old behavior.)

Source code review icon

Users have always been able to double-click to add a review comment to any line of source code. Now that functionality is more obvious because there is also a small "add a comment" icon at the far left-hand of the source code line under the mouse.

Gray for closed issues and deprecated downloads

To give a more clear visual indication that an issue is closed or a download is deprecated, we now use a gray heading background color on those pages rather than the usual light blue.

Wiki section header links

Now when you roll your mouse over wiki section headings, you will see a small paragraph marker symbol appear. That symbol is linked to that specific anchor point on the page. So, copying the link or bookmarking it will bring you directly back to that section of the page.

Stars on wiki pages and downloads

You can now star wiki pages and downloads, and later search among just the ones that you have starred. Starring also helps you notice items that you care about in the list views.

Better support for projects with a lot of labels

Now the autocomplete menu shows a scrollbar if there are a large number of autocomplete options. Previously, it just rendered a huge menu on the page which was likely to require the user to scroll down the whole page.

View project quota in one location (e.g. Issue Attachments, Downloads, VCS)

You can now see how much quota is allocated to your project in one location. This can be found under the Administer -> Advanced sub-tab.

Use your Google password for Mercurial, instead of your Google Code password

You can now choose to use your Google password for Mercurial clients. This setting can be set on your settings page under User Preferences -> Security.

May 2010

Issue Notification reasons

In issue notification email messages, the footer now includes a line that explains specifically why the message was delivered to you. E.g., because you are the issue owner, because you were explicitly CC'd on the issue, or because you starred the issue. If no reason is given, the message was sent to the project's all-issue-changes address, which is usually a mailing list.

Comment pagination on wiki and issue pages

Some issues and wiki pages have a huge number of comments. We now paginate the comments so that only the 500 most-recent comments are shown initially.

April 2010

Updated Project Search

Updated the algorithm for ranking projects in project search. Made the UI for project search look consistent with other Google properties. Updated the project search results page to show the project logo and last updated information. Fixed an issue where we were showing wiki markup in project search results.

Activity Indicator

Project homepages were updated to make all the metadata 'bubbles' look consistent. There is now an activity indicator that makes it possible to quickly see how active a project is.

March 2010

New Subversion service

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/03/faster-subversion-hosting.html

Feb 2010

Notable Mercurial fixes

Mercurial now rejects pushes of corrupted bundles. This protects your hosted repository in case your local repository gets into a bad state.

Jan 2010

Mercurial upgraded to 1.4

Project Hosting on Google Code now supports Mercurial v1.4.

December 2009

Issue attachment previews for images

The Issue Tracker lets you directly view image attachments in the browser without having to download the image. All image attachments also have a thumbnail, making it easy to find the right screenshot within an issue.

October 2009

New From: address for notification emails

Newly created projects will now send notifications from PROJECTNAME@googlecode.com. Existing projects can opt into using the new From: address after updating mailing list configurations.

Blocked-on can be specified for new issues

Project owners and committers can now enter new issues and set the "Blocked on" field in the same step. This makes it easier to quickly enter work items for yourself and your team when you know that there is a dependency among the tasks.

Improved notification email threading

The notification emails for changes to a given issue, comments on a given wiki page, or code review comments on a given revision, should now thread together in most email clients.

Issue Tracker Data API

The Issue Tracker Data API is a Google Data API that you can use to programmatically add new issues, make changes to existing issues, or simply access issues for your open source project. Learn More.

User clones

Any user can visit any Mercurial repository and create a server-side user clone of that repository, without asking permission from the project owner. These personal user clones can be easily shared with other developers -- who also can make a clone of that clone. Learn More.

August 2009

Issue label and status value tool-tips

When viewing an issue, hovering the mouse over the issue status and labels in the left-hand column now shows a tool-tip with the doc-string set for them under the "Administer" tab.

Issue list position retained

Now when you drill into an issue list to view an issue in detail, and then pop back up to the issue list, you will see the most recently viewed issue highlighted in the list. This makes it easier to quickly navigate among issues using the j, k, Enter, and u keystrokes.

Multiple repository support for Mercurial

Mercurial projects can now have multiple repositories. These new project repositories can be added through the Source sub-tab under the Administer tabs. Project repositories can be clones of the original default repository.

July 2009

Commit emails with or without diffs

Commit notification emails can now include diff output or not. Project owners can control that via a checkbox on the Source subtab of the Administer tab.

Subversion upgraded

Google Code's subversion server has been upgraded from version 1.5 to 1.6.

People subtab and configurable permissions

The new "People" subtab on each project home page allows project owners and members to easily document what each project member's duties are. A new "contributor" role and the ability to grant permissions gives project owners a lot more flexibility when they need it. Learn more.

May 2009

Commit log commands

It is now possible to update an issue via a commit log message. For example, you can commit a code change that fixes a defect, and write "(fixes issue 123456)" and the status value of that issue will be set to "Fixed". Learn more.

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are now available in the issue tracker. Type "?" to see a list of the shortcuts.

Mercurial version control system

Mercurial support is now available for general use. You can create a project using Mercurial, or convert an existing SVN repository. Our MercurialStatus page has a list of known issues.

April 2009

Shift-click to select multiple issues

In the issue list, project owners and committers can now select a range of issues by clicking one checkbox and then shift-clicking on another checkbox. All the issues between the two checkboxes will be selected or unselected. After that, the "Bulk edit..." item in the "Actions..." menu can be used to edit all those issues at once.

Privacy option for user updates

In the world of open source, everyone's contributions are available for everyone else to see. Our user updates feature makes it easy to see exactly what any other developer has been doing on our site. However, some users prefer that their contributions be seen only within the context of each project, so we have added a user setting to disable visibility of user updates. Sign in and see your settings page for details.

WikiWords now auto-linked in all tools

If you mention the name of one of your wiki pages using a WikiWord in any issue, commit log message, or code review, we will automatically link to that wiki page.

March 2009

Customizable project logos

As announced in our blog post, project owners can now upload a custom project logo to be displayed at the top of every page in the project. The Google-sponsored projects are keeping the "Google Code" logo. All the other projects that we host have a great new default logo with a "g" on a monitor.

Soft-delete issues and issue attachments

When you're done with an issue, you should just set its status to Fixed or some other closed status value. But, sometimes you really want to delete an issue. For example, if it contains a password that is hard to change. Now project owners can delete the whole issue via the "More actions..." menu on the issue comment form. Individual attachments can also be deleted.

Self-serve repository resets

Version control is all about maintaining history. If you want to make changes, or even start with a whole new directory structure, you can do that with regular svn commands. However, sometimes you need to reset your repository history so that you can 'svnsync' content from another svn server. You can now do that a little more easily without needing to file a support request.

Project creation limit raised

We limit the rate at which users can create projects, and we also have a lifetime limit on the number of projects created by each account. These limits exist to help us catch abuse and some types of well-intentioned but misguided use. Most users never reach these limits, but some do. Now that we have more ways to deal with abuse, we have increased the lifetime project creation limit to 25. However, please use each project that you create wisely and seriously. For example, please don't repeatedly create a new project as a way to give a fresh start to an existing project, instead 'svn rm' files and close old issues.

February 2009

"My projects" drop-down for quick navigation

Now it's easy to navigate to projects that you are a member of, or that you have starred. Just click on the "My projects" drop-down menu in the far upper right of any project hosting page.

Track updates by project or developer

Tracking open source projects and other developers is now as easy as starring a project or a developer profile. All updates from starred projects and developers can be tracked by looking at the "Updates" tab on your profile page. For the details, see our blog post.

Subversion upgraded to 1.5

The Subversion component of Google Code Project Hosting has been upgraded to version 1.5. What does this mean to users? If you're using a Subversion 1.5 client, you can now take advantage of Subversion's improved "merge tracking" feature to manage branches. See our blog post for more information.

January 2009

Post commit web hooks

Project owners can now trigger an HTTP POST to a URL of their choice after each commit to version control. This enables users to write POST handlers that kick off builds, tests, notifications, or anything else that they can imagine. See PostCommitWebHooks for details.

New wiki features

You can now embed videos into wiki pages, including the project homepage. See WikiSyntax for details.

Better syntax highlighting

We upgraded to the latest version of google-code-prettify, improving language detection and adding support in the source browser for highlighting Haskell, LISP, CSS, Visual Basic, and our own wiki syntax.

Issue filter rules

Much like message filter rules in an email client, project owners can now set up issue filter rules. These rules look for certain labels on an issue, and then apply default values for the issue owner or status, or add labels or CC addresses. Unlike email filter rules, issue filter rules are applied after every issue change, not just when new issues are entered. And, the field values that are derived in filter rules are always default values: they never overwrite values that are explicitly set on the issue. For example, default issue owners can be defined based on Component-* labels.

December 2008

More quota

We're increasing the maximum file sizes from 20MB to 40MB, Subversion quotas from 100MB to 1GB, and download quotas from 100MB to 2GB.

New web page header

The top of each project hosting web page is now a little cleaner and more consistent with other Google pages.

-1 on "+1"s

An issue tracker is a serious tool for tracking serious work. When users chime in on a hot issue with a large number of "+1" comments to show their support for the issue, they are actually distracting and annoying the developers who should be working on resolving the issue, as well as other users. We provide a star icon for users to express their interest in an issue without triggering any notification emails, but some users are still in the bad habit of posting "+1" comments. Now we make the star widget easier for average users to find right at the point where they might be tempted to add a "+1" comment. And, we automatically block "+1" comments that don't add other value.

November 2008

Wiki improvements

We increased the power of our wiki in three ways:

1. You can use one wiki page as a sidebar on your other pages for navigation.
2. You can create a table-of-contents within a wiki page with <wiki:toc max_depth="1" />
3. We now support mixing some simple HTML into the wiki pages so that you can accomplish things that are hard to do with wiki markup alone.

Autolinking of URLs in issue and revision text

Now if you mention a URL in the text of an issue comment or a subversion commit log message, that URL is automatically shown as a hyperlink.

More compact issue notification emails

The format of our issue notification emails has changed to now put the metadata at the top. The summary still includes the issue number, project name, and issue summary. Moving the metadata up improves the snippets shown in Gmail and other mail clients.

Artifact sorting by username

A long-standing problem with sorting issues, downloads, and wiki pages has been fixed. Previously these items did not sort properly by usernames, such as the issue "owner" or file "uploadedby" columns. Also, new issue list columns are available for the issue reporter and Cc list. To see all the built-in columns, click the "..." table header in any list view.

Issue blocking and merging

In a small project, only a few people are involved, and they become pretty familiar with the issues in their issue tracker. But, now that we are hosting more large projects, we are adding the option to formalize more of what small teams know implicitly.

Users always had the ability to document in plan language that one issue could not be worked on until another issue was completed, and the issue reference in that text becomes a hyperlink to the other issue. Now, issues can be explicitly marked as blocked on other issues. Changing issue A to make it blocked on issue B adds hyperlinks in both directions between the two issues, and adds a comment to issue B at the same time that issue A is updated.

Users could always close an issue as a duplicate and mention the original issue in the comment. Now, if the status field if set to Duplicate, users also have the option to merge the duplicate issue with the original issue. Merging adds all unique stars and Cc values to the original issue, and automatically adds a comment to the original issue.

Starred projects

Users can now star projects that you are interested in so that you can easily revisit them. On the summary page of any project, just click the star icon in the right-hand column. The list of projects that you have starred is shown on your profile page.

October 2008

Onward or upward?

Our issue tracker UI was designed with tabbed browsing in mind. For example, if you want to triage several issues, you can middle-mouse click on links in the issue list to open several issues in separate browser tabs, then step through each of them rapidly.

Now there is another way to rapidly step through issues in your project using just one browser tab. When you submit an issue, you can now specify whether you would like to go up to the issue list, stay on the same issue, or go to the next issue in the list.

Assigned code reviews

We love to see developers doing code reviews because it is one of the best ways to improve quality and help everyone on your team stay in-touch with changes as they are made. Since July we've offered a very easy-to-use code review tool that allows anyone to comment on any line of any revision.

Now, we are adding assigned reviews: these are issues labeled Type-Review that request that a project member review code that has been committed to a branch. These issues can be created through the Web !UI or through special syntax in a commit log message. The issues are listed in the issue tracker, as well as at the top of the recent changes page. Each issue links to a branch review page that summarizes all the changes made on that branch. Once a review is done, its issue can be closed. See the CodeReviews page for more information.

Gadgets in, gadgets out

You can now place any gadget in a wiki page in your project. That makes it possible to show video, charts, and stats. And, you can now put gadgets with info about your project onto your iGoogle page (or any other gadget container). See our blog post for more details.

Project updates

The new "Updates" subtab shows a summary of recent project activity, including commits and issue changes. It's a great way to understand how active a project is, and who did what. See our blog post for more information.

August 2008

Issue templates

Project owners can now define a set of issue templates that users can choose from when entering new issues. Each template has initial values for the issue summary, description, owner, status, and labels. For example, the template for a user defect report asks for different information than the template for an enhancement request.

July 2008

Source code review tools

Code reviews can be a very effective way to improve your code quality, and keep your project members involved in the changes that might affect their work. We now offer a source code review tool that is integrated with Google Code's project hosting.

Reviewing code in your project is simple: browse any source file or diff, double click on a source line to add comments, then publish your comments along with a general comment and score for the revision.

You can see code reviews in action on the code.google.com support project. For complete documentation, see the CodeReviews wiki page.

Project feeds

We now have Atom feed available for you to track issues, downloads, Subversion changes, and Wiki updates. For a list of all feeds in a given project, click the Project Feeds link in the right-hand column of the project home page.

June 2008

Browse history of files even if they were moved or copied

Version control is all about access, changes, and history. When a source code file is moved or copied from one location to another, subversion tracks the old pathname and the new one. The normal svn log command shows you the entire past history of a file, even if it has been moved or copied over time.

Now we present that same information in the web interface for source code browsing. The revision navigation links now offer links to previous versions of the file, even if those previous versions were at a different previous location. And, when viewing the list of all changes to a given file, the list is divided into sections for each pathname that the file has had over time. For example, the Hello.java in GWT 1.5 came straight from trunk, whereas some other files have been moved a few times.

May 2008

Atom feeds for issue changes and commits

Developers need to stay aware of changes happening in their projects and projects that they depend on. Usually that means a very full email inbox and lots of automated message filtering. But, there is a better way.

We now offer atom feeds for the most recent svn commits and issue changes in a project. When you visit the source code change list page or the issue list page, click the feed icon in your browser location bar to subscribe to the feed. For example, here is a feed of issue changes in the Gears project.

Downloadable issue list .csv file

Do you need to do something with your issue data that our issue tracker just can't do? For example, you might like to produce a bar chart of issues assigned to each developer. Now we help you do that by allowing you to download a comma-separated-value file that has the same information you see in the issue list. Just click the "CSV" link at the bottom of the issue list. With most operating systems and browsers, that will take you straight to a spreadsheet application.

Source browsing file diff now includes SVN Property diffs

The title says it all. If you changed file properties in an svn commit, you will now see the old and new values of those properties on the diff page.

Issue bulk editing

It's time for spring cleaning of the issues in your project: organize them by milestone, organize them by component, or assign them all to your project members. Doing that just got a lot easier because we now offer issue bulk editing.

In the issue list, signed-in project owners and committers can check the checkboxes for several issues on one page and then use the "Actions..." drop-down menu at the top of the list to select "Bulk edit...". The bulk edit page allows you to enter one comment that will be appended to all the selected issues. You can set the status or owner of all the issues by filling in those fields. And, you can add or remove labels by entering the label name, or the label name proceeded by a minus-sign.

Autolinking in svn commit log messages

Now when you mention issues or other revisions in your subversion commit log messages, the text will automatically be linked to the detail page for those artifacts. Just as with autolinked references in issues and wiki pages, the syntax is issue 123 or issue #123 for issues, and r123 for revisions. If the linked issue has been closed, it will appear crossed-out. In most browsers, hovering your mouse over the issue link displays the one-line summary of the issue.

March 2008

Source code browsing improvements

We've been working on improving the source code browsing tool. Intra-line diffs now make it much easier to notice exactly which characters changed on each line. We've also improved the speed of the tool and made it more robust for projects that have large source trees.

Jan 2008

Source code browsing tool

The great thing about open source is that anyone can see the source code. Well, that just got a lot easier on Google Code.

Unlike many of the existing source code browsing tools, ours allows you to quickly drill down into multiple levels of directories. And, we built in the assumption that you want to get straight to the source, even though file metadata is still easily accessible on the same page. Syntax highlight makes your source code easier to read, and our syntax highlighting works without bloating the HTML markup.

Source code is not just about code, it is also about how and why the code has changed over time. So, the "Changes" subtab gives you a concise list of all revisions to your source code repository, and each revision can display the log message and show diffs. We also made it easy to flip through revisions or diffs of a given file.

To browse the source code of any project, just click the "Source" tab, and then the "Browse" subtab. If you have already memorized the instructions for how to check out source code, you might want to change your personal settings so that the "Browse" subtab is shown by default. Enjoy!

Dec 2007

Replace a project tab with a wiki page

To keep our project hosting service simple and easy to use, we only offer one version control system, one wiki, one download system, and one issue tracker. These tools are designed to be flexible to fit the needs and best practices of most small- to medium-sized open source projects. However, we know that one size does not fit all: some projects have existing tools hosted elsewhere, or simply prefer to use other google products or tools hosted on another site.

Now project owners can write a simple wiki page giving end-users instructions on how to get to your external tool, and then replace the corresponding project tab with that wiki page. That wiki page can link to the other site, or you can customize the landing pages for our hosted tools by linking to specific pages within your own project. And, undesired project tabs can be hidden from users, for example a documentation project you might not need the Downloads tab.

Sept 2007

Use any Google Account, not just Gmail accounts

Previously, we required that all project members use Gmail accounts. That restriction helped us manage certain types of spam, but it inconvenienced many legitimate users as well. We've made improvements to the way that we manage the site, and can now pass on the convenience to users.

Project members can now be specified with the full email address of any Google Account.

July 2007

Easier way to get to project home pages

Shorter, simpler URLs look better and are easier to remember. When developers put their heart into a project they want it to make the best first impression, which is often in the form of a URL in an email or on another web page.

We've always valued clean URLs for project home pages, and have used http://code.google.com/p/PROJECTNAME since we started offering project hosting. Now, projects can also be reached via an even cleaner URL: http://PROJECTNAME.googlecode.com.

Grid view of issues

When projects start, they have a few defect reports and requests for enhancements. A simple list of issues is good enough: a developer picks some issue, solves it, and closes it. But, as projects grow in scope, the number of open issues can grow and it can be hard to know which issues to work on first. Sorting and filtering the list can help developers understand the set of open issues, but now there is an easier way.

The grid view of issues uses rows and columns to lay out issues according to any two attributes. For example, support issues by milestone and priority. The grid view can also easily show the number of open issues associated with each component, or the number of issues owned by each project member.

Improvements to list views

Project artifacts in your project workspace have a variety of built-in attributes, and can be labeled with Key-Value pairs as user-defined attributes. These attributes can be used as column headings in any list view as a way to bring out and organize information according to the structure that makes the most sense for that project.

Several improvements were made to the list views to help project owners use the power of user-defined attributes more fully:

• Project owners can now define default columns and sorting in the issue tracker, wiki page list, and downloads list.
• End-user list configuration is now kept when the user edits an issue
• The number of items displayed per page has been increased to 100
• We now display the entire summary of artifacts, even it it would be so long that it word-wraps

Clarification of the purpose of stars

When a user clicks the star icon on an issue, he or she is indicating an interest in that issue. We make it easy for users to search the issues that they have starred. Also, users will receive email notification of changes to issues that they have starred. And, everyone who visits the project can see the number of users who have starred each issue.

We have clarified the email notification aspect of stars by adding tool-tips to the stars and a reminder that starring causes notification of changes to the issue detail page.

Issue tracker comments

Sometimes a user leaves a comment on an issue that is irrelevant or which contains information like a password that should not be displayed to other users. It can happen to any of us if we accidentally comment on the wrong issue or paste in a big chunk of text.

Now, those unwanted comments can be deleted or undeleted by the user who entered them, or by the project owner.

Wiki page comments

Wiki's are community-owned knowledge-bases: they should allow contributions from anyone who notices a problem or wants to add valuable information, but they can also lose some of their value if they are vandalized, if they become disorganized, or if incorrect information is added.

The project wiki feature that we offer now strikes a balance between these trade-offs by allowing any logged in user to append a comment to the wiki pages. Project members may then review the comments and choose to:

• Leave them as useful comments
• Incorporate them into the page, and delete the comment since it would be redundant
• Delete any valueless comments

Google Analytics integration

Open source projects are all about collaboration between project members and the users of the software being developed. To provide the most useful software to your users, you might want to know simply how many potential users have visited your project workspace, which countries they come from, which browsers they use, and which of your wiki pages they have viewed.

Now all those questions can be answered. Project owners may simply sign up for Google Analytics and enter an analytics profile number into the project admin page. Tracking data can be viewed on the Google Analytics site about 24 hours later.

Bug fixes

We continue to work hard to improve the quality and reliability of the project hosting service by finding and fixing defects. Please check our current support issues, star the issues that are most important to you, and report and new defects that you find.

April 2007

Autolinking of issues

Software development is all about putting ideas into working software. It turns out that the software created has a lot of interconnections, and the process of creating that software requires even more connections, dependencies, and references between all the information produced as part of the project. Google code hosting has always offered the developers the ability to link web pages in subversion, and wiki pages. We also encourage the use of Google groups or other mailing list archives that make past messages accessible via a link. And, every issue has had a clear URL that can be linked to, but only by specifying the full link.

Now, you can easily and automatically link to any issue from another issue comment or from a wiki page. Just write "issue N" or "issue #N" and it will be linked to the corresponding issue in your project. If that issue is closed, the link text will be crossed out. Moving your mouse over the link shows the summary of the issue.

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