Release 11

Our next release has just gone live.

New features

• Crop approval flash alert for wranglers upon sign in
• Added Bootstrap accessibility plugin

Technical improvements

• Removed redundant code from our crowdfunder last year
• Remove warnings and debugging puts from rspec output
• Add capybara-screenshot to assist with feature testing
• Use standardized & translateable strings for the photo show page
• Stop hard-coding strings for pagination
• Refactor photo controller create for readability
• Updated Gemfile.lock for Code Climate inclusion
• Add code climate to README
• Add config/factory_girl.rb so that rspec doesn't fail with a confusing 'Could not find mapping for #<Member...' error. This happens when you make significant changes to a controller then re-run rspec. It's a Factory Girl / rspec caching issue. It's only a problem for devs running rspec locally, not Travis.
• Precompile css and js with sass
• Moving database.yml and adding gitignore to make it easier for different dev setups
• Issue 690 Switch on CMS and remove old files

Bug fixes

• Aligned links properly on "Forgot password" page, "Resend confirmation" and "Resend unlock" pages
• Add a location not set layout so that your profile page still looks sensible if you don't have a location set
• Display one line of description in harvest card, then go to ellipsis
• Capture originalText from the button that's been clicked, not from the array of all possible date-picker buttons.
• Make seed card heading link to seed page and add owner link.
• Set background color on autocomplete dropdown.
• Swap over to having "(Optional)" (or translation) after optional form elements rather than using placeholder text, so it's better for screenreaders
• Clip long text in definition lists within panels
• Improve nearby places links
• Improve the styling of a planting to be more like the other card-layouts
• Darken navbar item text when it opens (and the background turns light) to make it more readable
• Fix mailchimp newsletter subscriptions - this won't take effect until we have MailChimp working again, but when we do, it will allow us to send out newsletters to everyone.
• Fix "duplicated key: :class" warning in HAML code

Release 10

We've just put some more new code live. This time it's mostly back-end fixes that only developers see, but it'll make it easier for the next improvements.

New Features

• Mark private messages as read automatically when you reply to them

Bug Fixes

• None this time

Technical Improvements

• New versions of many gems, including a security fix for paperclip
• Changed over to new hash syntax to match the newer version of Ruby
• Switched our CSS engine from less to sass - both of them compress files and make everything neat, but less's toolchain is older, hasn't been updated for a while and no longer works on Mac OS X.

Let us know of any issues you find!

Release 9

Some of the changes (there were a lot) included:

• Icons showing sunny/part/shade
• Made the planting and member pages more responsive (i.e., prettier on mobile)
• Optimized finding interesting plantings, for faster load times
• Alternate and scientific names can be put in during crop creation instead of afterward
• Re-styled the thumbnails on seed & garden pages
• When you refer to a crop in a post, there'll be a picture of the crop on the post page
• Only "active" plantings show on garden pages now
• Tell you whether it worked when you delete a photo
• Progress bars for how long we expect a plant to take until harvest
• Posts and comments have edit dates
• Last login is listed on member profiles
• Homepage no longer claims everything happened "1 minute ago"
• Organic and GMO seed data is available via the API
• Redesigned navigation bar
• When you write a new post, your text cursor will automatically start out in the subject field
• One-click email unsubscribe
• You can see what you're replying to when you reply to a message

And a few security fixes

Release 8

We've just pushed a load of new features and bugfixes to the site, thanks to @pozorvlak for kicking it off and @maco for supporting, as well as all our coders and testers.

New Features

• New crop request form! This makes the approval process easier on the crop wranglers.
• Search now checks alternate names (such as coriander and cilantro) and scientific names (not yet available - see below)
• Seeds have organic, GMO, and heirloom options, along with and how many days until maturity
• You can now attach photos to your garden
• On the member page, members can be sorted by name or by how recently they joined
• When logged out, visitors will see a note at the top of post pages, so first-time visitors can see what Growstuff is all about
• Wranglers now see a "wrangle crops" button on the crop listing page

Bug Fixes

• You can no longer claim to have fewer than 0 seeds.
• The page footer height has been tweaked.
• You can no longer follow yourself.
• Crop wranglers will no longer see an error page if they leave out the Wikipedia link when adding a new crop.
• Some formatting bugs with the homepage and browse crops have been fixed.
• Sometimes users would see an error page when they tried to follow other users: this should no longer happen.
• Users should no longer receive an error when trying to download harvest data.
• Harvest photos should now provide a link back to their harvest after attaching the photo.

Technical Improvements

• Static content like the page footer is now stored in a CMS, for easier maintenance.
• We're now storing all harvest weights as kilograms in addition to whatever unit you put in, with conversion handled by ruby-units. This will let us give harvest totals more easily in the future.
• Users can now search by alternate names, scientific names, and partial names, with the matching handled by ElasticSearch
• Travis CI now pushes successful builds on the dev branch to the staging site on Heroku, so merging a pull request to dev automatically deploys it to staging.
• Lots more features are now covered by automated tests.

Release 7

Major features:

• Massive crop upload including brassicas, squashes, mint familiy (Lamaciae) and more.
• Follow other members. You can now follow other Growstuff members. (Note: there are still some improvements to be made to the email notifications related to this.)
• Send out regular planting reminder emails to members (although this has been ready for a while, we'll finally be switching this on in production with this release!)

Minor improvements:

• Some changes to the layout of the homepage -- we've moved what was in the sidebar down into footer links, and given the rest of the homepage a little more breathing room.
• Started to use and manage plural versions of crop names, eg. "tomatoes" rather than "tomato". This is more complex than it sounds because many food crops have irregular pluralisation!
• Small improvements to the crop detail page to make it easier to find via search engines.
• Added Facebook contact link to footer (alongside Twitter etc)
• Rearranged titles on RSS feeds to make them display better in browser tabs
• Made it easier to specify the date on which a planting was finished, via a popup calendar on the planting detail page
• Improved the flow for signing in, if you try to do something you don't have authorization to do.

Bugfixes:

• Improved display of crops on the "Browse crops" page, especially making sure that the text of crops with long names doesn't overflow and mess up the alignment.
• Show finished date correctly on plantings index page
• Prevent the creation of a garden with a negative number for its area
• Remove unused photos -- if a photo is removed from all the plantings/harvests it was being shown on, the photo is now deleted from the system entirely.

Technical improvements:

• Upgraded our underlying platform to Rails 4! This is a big change, and very welcome, as it brings us up to date technologically. Also bumped our Ruby version to 2.1.5.
• Fixed problems installing libv8 on OSX (much appreciated by our developers!)

2014-01-03: Harvest and garden improvements, etc

It's been a while since our last release! This one includes:

• Harvest improvements: various small tweaks and improvements to our harvest features, including fixing some display bugs.
• New garden fields: mark gardens as inactive, specify size of a garden, and specify location (different from your own location, eg. for old gardens or allotments)
• Upload crops: we've written a rake task to help you load arbitrary CSV files of crops from the command line.
• More RSS links: posts and comments now have RSS links at the bottom of the page
• Plus a handful of developer-oriented improvements: better_errors in dev, subdue heroku warnings, refactor Crop.system_name to Crop.name

Happy New Year!

2014-01-02: please ignore

Release created in error; please ignore.

2013-10-15: Harvests

This release includes a new "harvest" feature that lets you track what you've harvested, alongside what you've planted.

• Signed in homepage: "quick links" are now buttons, and "Harvest" has been added to them
• "Your Stuff" menu now has a "Harvests" item on it
• Either of the above take you to the "new harvest" form, where you can track what you harvested, how much, etc.
• As usual, you can view your own or everyone's harvests, eg. http://growstuff.org/harvests
• You can now download a CSV file (to load into a spreadsheet program) of harvests, plantings, seeds, and crops.
• We've also added handy links to the JSON data (for API users) and RSS feeds where available

This is part of our roadmap for 2013 and we're working on it with Permaculture Melbourne as part of their Harvest Benchmarking project. There are more harvest-related features planned for the near future; see those two links for more detail.

2013-09-19: order referral codes, CSS fixes

A small release with just one notable change and some minor tweaks.

Release notes

• Added a "referral code" to orders for when you checkout. This allows you to mention that your order is associated with a particular community or project or something. We did this because of a project we're working on with Permaculture Melbourne; they're paying us for the work, but the amount they pay will be partly made up of member subscriptions, so we need to track them somehow.
• Apart from that, just a few CSS fixes. One removes spurious bullet point dots that were accidentally added in the previous release, and another couple fix formatting errors with the navbars on mobile devices.

And that's it!

2013-09-12: places, help text, bulbs, crop hierarchy, etc

Release notes

• The most significant new feature is the "Places" page, which shows where our members are located. This is a fairly trivial use of our geodata, but now we've got all the pieces in place, we'll be able to do maps of things like where crops are grown, what's being grown near a given location, etc.
• We removed "search for nearby members" and integrated it into the Places pages eg. Melbourne. These specific place-pages are now linked from various places around the site, eg. member profiles, seed sharing lists, etc.
• We also improved the "members near a place" function so it always shows the 30 nearest members, in order of nearness.
• As a side effect of all this, the following new endpoints are available in our "Version 0" API: /places.json (a list of everything mappable, which for now is just members, but may include other things in future), and /places/ANYWHERE.json (a list of mappable things in order of distance from that location, in order of nearness)
• We added helpful text in a few places, most notably on the planting form (in response to suggestions from Growstuff member mamagotcha.
• We added "bulb" as a propagation method for plantings, thanks to a suggestion from someone on Twitter (sorry, my memory is not that great and nor is my Twitter client's)
• We added a crop hierarchy page, mostly useful to crop wranglers but potentially of interest to others. It shows crops and their varieties in an indented tree format. The same code is now used for displaying sub-varieties on individual crop pages, too.

And that's it, I think!

This release was made from the Growstuff HQ blanket fort.