Documentation and Products sections upgraded!

We recently did a pretty significant update of the software that powers our "Products section":/products, as well as lots of bug fixes to the "Documentation section":documentation. Developers that manage releases and projects should read below to make sure they update their projects to take advantage of the new options. What's new for end-users? Project page revamped with stable and experimental release sections -- It's now very easy to see which releases are the stable and recommended ones for production, as well as making it easy to find the more cutting-edge versions for testing. It also has small niceties such as linking to the code repository if there are no stable or experimental releases available. A good example of this is the "Plone project page":/products/plone, which shows a stable release and the upcoming releases with release dates. Clearer download options -- The download pages now have big platform icons making it more obvious which file to download when there are platform-specific packages. "Go directly to project" pulldown -- A pulldown menu on the products area front page gives an at-a-glance listing of all projects with releases (not necessarily final ones, just releases in progress) in alphabetical order, to make it easier to find a project when you know the name but not the category or URL. Alpha/beta/candidate/final release states are now managed with workflow -- This makes it easier to manage releases. In general, you will make one Release for each intended release of your product, and use the 'state' drop-down to release alpha, beta, candidate and final releases. Please see "the documentation":/documentation/tutorial/plone-software-center/release-phases for more details on how this works. Alpha/beta/candidate markers in the release name -- No more confusion about what state a project is in when coming from a search engine. It will also warn you if you are trying to download a release that is outdated. All links go to the project -- All the release links now go to the project itself, not the release — which makes it easier to understand what a product is all about before downloading it. More relevant information -- Important details such as version compatibility and relase dates are displayed inline on the project page Roadmap and Improvement Proposal enhancements -- The releases now only list items that are in progress or complete. Items still under discussion are listed in a separate table. I'm a project manager for one of the projects listed, what do I need to do with my older releases? Glad you asked. ;) Essentially, the big new thing is that release states (alpha, beta, candidate, final) are now governed by workflow. We made a migration script that did the maturity → workflow state mapping for you, but there will be instances like this fictional example:: Some Project 1.2beta2 (Beta release) Earlier, it was common to attach the beta2 or whatever designation to the version number. We have changed this so that you **only** have the version number in that field, and there is a different way of tracking release state — in this particular case: - Beta state is indicated by workflow now → should be correct because of the migration script, but you should remove the 'beta2' part of the release number by editing the release - Beta number has a separate property that is automatically incremented when you do a re-relase → in this case you would either: - Select 'Re-release' from the workflow menu → the workflow increments the release number to 2, *or* - Edit the 'Release number' property on the release (useful when it's alpha release 24 and you don't feel like hitting the 'Re-release' transition 23 times ;) The end result will make your release title look like this:: Some Project 1.2 (Beta release 2) Nifty. If you don't feel like doing this, that's OK too - it'll just contain a bit more redundant information in the title. All your new releases will get this right. More information can be found in the "release process documentation":/documentation/tutorial/plone-software-center/release-phases. We hope you like the new and improved Plone Software Center and Plone Help Center! We're aiming for a 1.0 release of both of these projects as soon as it has been live on plone.org for a while, in case we missed out on any bugs. If you find any, please report these in the "Plone Software Center issue tracker":/products/plonesoftwarecenter/issues and the "Plone Help Center issue tracker":/products/plonesoftwarecenter/issues. — Alexander Limi & Martin Aspeli