We’re finally delivering on our goal of making these stable releases a lot more frequent.  This is the 7th update from user feedback in the stable branch for 2008, but it’s coming only a week after the last update (which was 20 days on the heels of the release before that).

I talked about Build 603’s major performance boost here on the blog; but we haven’t talked about the most recent improvements since then.

The primary focus lately has been on performance and usability.  We’re definitely still making progress on the major feature requests, like localization, time tracking, and reports.  It’s just more important to make sure we’re stopping to tidy things up every couple releases so we can keep up the same development agility.

We’ve still been getting the most insight on performance tuning and optimization from our network of on-demand helpdesks.  For our environment, the biggest speed improvements have come from moving the caches off the local disk and by enabling APC (a PHP compile cache).  Cerb4 and Devblocks have had memcached support for shared memory caching since early on, but until these recent builds we hadn’t been supporting truly distributed caches.  The recent builds also add prefix support to the cache manager so multiple installations can share a caching back-end (which is especially helpful in a hosting environment).

On the usability end, we had a couple nice improvements:

• We took all the feedback (mainly from the forums) about ticket comments and added the ability to display comments threaded into the ticket conversation (chronologically).
• We added a subtle visual indicator to elements of a ticket conversation: inbound, outbound, comments and notes.
• We improved the interface by softening up some stark lines between major elements (especially on Mail Overview or Ticket Display).  We added a consistent style to all the buttons in the application so they should look similar across browsers (and regardless of your OS theme).
• We streamlined the guided installer so it’s no longer asking new users to create Workers or Groups before they have an understanding of what those things mean.  The installer now creates some sample Groups and Buckets.  It also pre-configures group spam rules.  The first ticket for the helpdesk is now procedurally generated as the last step of the installation.  It shows up as a message from our development team welcoming people to the project and telling them what to do to get started.  Replying to that message from their Cerb4 will actually send a message right to our support team.  It’s an easy way to get help from inside the app, while also exploring how things work.
• We’ve added more keyboard shortcuts to Mail Overview and Display Ticket.  The possible shortcuts are now more context-sensitive when displaying the keys (it won’t show you shortcuts that won’t actually do anything for the current items).
• A “Read All” mode has been added to the Display Ticket screen, which will automatically expand every message and show the conversation chronologically.
• When assigning a Next Worker you can now also choose when to expire the assignment (such as at the end of your shift).  After the expiration, any worker will be able to handle the follow-up responses.  This still allows better efficiency during a shift where workers can handle their own short-term followup replies.

There are also a two dozen or so smaller feature requests and bug fixes.

You can read the full changelogs here:

http://www.cerb4.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=10

Enjoy!