Redmine's 4.0 new version
We can already welcome the new version 4.0. for Redmine, our preferred open source task and project manager, which I implement and help to improve in all types of organizations: public agencies, service companies, industrial companies, SMEs, large companies …
This major update contains about 200 improvements and bug fixes, some of which have long been awaited by the community.
The development community must be thanked for the effort they make in the continuous improvement of Redmine. However, I must admit that this major update leaves me a bit “cold”, as the improvements introduced do not represent a particularly striking step forward. In fact in “User interface” topics, the improvements are minimal. I have always thought that the idea of the core developers is to focus on functionality and leave the user interface to design specialists UI-UX. That's why initiatives like the one I'm promoting in BestRedmineTheme are being so successful.
At the end of this post, you can read my recommendation. Before upgrading to the latest Redmine version, please take a look and then decide.
Redmine 4.0. Improvements Summary
Here I explain the improvements that I consider more important:
Accounts and Security
- an explanation has been added to the links to reset password: now they include a note to clarify that they are valid only once (#28561)
Administration
- export of users to CSV. We hope that soon they can also be imported from CSV (#5957)
- option to reactivate a project when visiting an archived project (#29993)
- in the project settings, the configuration related to issues and their custom fields has been moved to its own tab (#26488)
Attachments
Calendar and Gantt
- context menu has been added to issues in calendar (#28067) and in Gantt ( #10485)
- task pane can be expanded or narrowed (#20481)
Email Notifications
- Till now the application sent a single notification to several recipients. This meant that if one of the addresses was incorrect, the notification would not be created and the action would result in an error. A separate notification is now sent to each user (#26791, #8157, #5703)
- notifications are now sent asynchronously by default: this way, they do not affect application performance (#30068)
Issues, Lists and Filters
- now you can choose subproject when creating the issue (#12704)
- Move action links and edit form above the history when displaying comments in reverse order (#23518)
- Issue Summary now includes all subprojects issues, if projects have to show subprojects' issues (#2529)
- when modifying position priorities, they lost their own colors; now they are recalculated to keep the colors (#28494)
- the “assigned” filter now also includes locked users (#15201)
- Highlight due date of overdue issues in the issues list (#27316)
Other Improvements
- My page: the “My activities” block is added to the page (#2471)
- When filtering by project, you can also filter by project status, so that only issues from active (or archived) projects are listed. (#20081)
- Allow copying documents when copying projects or wikis (#10282, #26621)
- Migrated to Rails version 5.2 and Ruby version 2.5.
- syntax has been added to be able to link to tasks including their ID, type and title. E.g., this link “##12” will be shown as “Bug #12: Bug example” (#29488)
- you can configure the default columns in the dedications list (#26356) and there is a new column indicating the date on which the time allocation was done (#26396)
- now you can bulk edit dedications to a project (#26534)
- minor improvements in the user interface
- application code improvements
- translations improvements
IMPORTANT
before updating, please make a complete back up of database and files. This is always fundamental, but especially in this case, as this is a major version with major changes to the code and platform, which can affect, for example, to the plugins installed in your Redmine.
if you have plugins installed in your Redmine application, you must make sure that they have also been updated to version 4.0 and are therefore compatible with it. Otherwise, you may encounter the dreaded 404 message when you restart the application.
RECOMENDATION
My recommendation is that you don't upgrade to version 4.0 yet. Wait a few weeks for it to consolidate and retouch some details that will surely arise and that will have to be solved in a 4.0.1 version. In addition, this way you give time to the plugins developers to update their code.
