We’ve just released a new set of updates to Nokia Projects. The main focus of the release was to improve stability and security, but we also managed to slip in some much needed usability improvements.

Project Explorer

The most visible change is an update to the Project Explorer.

Following a thorough usability review we’ve made a lot of relatively minor changes that make it a lot easier to use:

• All search parameters are now displayed at the top of the results page along with the number of results displayed and found (total). From
  here we can also clear the search parameters individually or as a group.
  • This makes it easy to see what is filtered, even if the sidebar is collapsed.
    
• Selected categories are better highlighted in the sidebar using colour, bold text and a checkbox
• The sidebar displays more key categories, and provides separate sections for filtering projects against license, development status and natural language.
• You can now display many more results on a page – up to 100.
• UI text for buttons and headings is now unambiguous
• URL links to the explorer open the sidebar to the correct locations.

We’ve also improved the UI logic for selecting parents and subcategories:

• Selection of a parent category silently includes articles in any subcategory in the search
• Subsequent selection of a subcategory deselects the parent category.
• As before, the search returns only those articles which have all selected categories. 

We don’t think you’ll need any instructions to be able to use Project Explorer effectively, but if you do, its fully documented in the Community Help & Support Wiki here.

We hope you like it! See #105 for more information.

Stability and Security 

Most of the work done this release was to improve our tools and processes for early detection and debugging of stability and security issues. In particular we’ve:

• Improved logging – we now make significantly more use of native Trac logging and fixed bugs in our custom logging solution in the Multi-Project plugging. All logs are now in one place, and the new logging code is significantly easier to manage and maintain
• Added basic load testing – we’ve created a simple performance load test using FunkLoad.

With these improved tools we’ve been able to discover and fix a number of intermittent stability bugs.

For more information see #107

Other improvements

We’ve also replaced the banner on the project home page. It was much too big, and now you get to the information about projects a lot faster.

For more information about the above improvements see the milestone report in Community Help & Support. We also welcome additional suggestions for improvement.