2018-07-12 Hi, guys! Better late than never: after two months of fruitful work, we are ready to present you a new version of Riter. Learn about new ways of working with project groups, extended functionalities of topics aliases, changes in GraphQL API, and noticeable bugfixes.

Working with groups of projects

The ability to work with multiple projects is not new at all - you already had such a feature in the previous Riter version. However, we have radically revised approaches to its implementation to simplify work with several projects both for developers and managers. First of all, we have abandoned creating a group of projects via a comma-separated list of project names in the URL, as you used to do. Today, this process is much more convenient and quick. If before such a group was more like a temporary united set of tasks from specified projects to display on the same board, now it may be used almost like a usual project.

Note: at the moment, to create a group of projects, you need to be a project manager. If you don't have such a privilege, ask you manager to create a necessary group (or several ones) for you from the project management panel. Probably later developers will be able to do this on their own without any middlemen. Though all the process takes a couple of seconds, so you won't hassle your managers too much.

As a manager, go to the admin panel to create a new group of projects. In the "Projects" submenu, you can now find a new section "Groups" next to "Active" and "Disabled" projects. When you click on it, you will see a list of all existing projects and necessary fields to combine several of them into a new group. You need to specify a name of a group and choose one or more projects to add into it. You will be able to change them anytime. Press "Create" and a new group will be displayed along with other projects on the same page. Here you can also edit or remove a group.

As soon as you create a group of projects, everybody who has access to all selected projects will be able to work with this group as with a separate project. Working with such a group is almost the same as before. It looks like a usual project with a unique name. All involved stories are listed together on the main page with short project names to let you distinguish tasks from different projects. When working with a project group, you can find a new kind of filters - by projects - on a statistics page. By default, all of them are included into the report, but you are able to change this, tracking only the data you need. In addition, creating a new story, you need to specify which particular project it should be added to.

Project groups may be useful in many cases. At first, if you have several related projects and need to track all their data simultaneously. For example, mobile and desktop apps of the same product. Moreover, project groups can be used to combine a few (or even all) projects of a particular user so that he or she doesn't need to switch between them all the time. With a single "all-included" project, you can be sure that you won't forget about any of your tasks.

Search by topics aliases

The next Riter feature that has been the object of recent changes is project settings. Topics aliases, to be exact. As you remember, on the project setting page you can update, archive, absorb topics and create aliases for them. Topics aliases are helpful if you work in a big team, where everybody is accustomed to certain terminology and it may be difficult to avoid topics duplication on particular tasks pages. Aliases let everybody use desired vocabulary without remembering accepted topics. Riter, in turn, replaces all the various synonyms with one terminology within the whole project.

This feature has been working perfectly when creating or adding topics to a project. Now search among stories by topics aliases is also supported. For example, you don't need to remember which topic your team uses for a "bug", you can type "error", "mistake", "bug", or something similar with equal success and filter all stories by any alias of the required topic. Just specify synonyms for all ambiguous topics, which can cause disagreements on names, on the settings page. Both developers and managers can create and update topics.

Riter API changes

If you use Riter API, pay attention to the following GraphQL changes. We have updated the User mutation section in the documentation with two methods to assign and unassign a user to/from a story. You can use assignUser(name: !String) and unassignUser(name: !String) mutations for this end.

Bugfixes

Finally, we have fixed all the bugs that we could find in the previous version. Noticed some other errors or annoying behavior of the software? Tell us about this, and we'll fix them sooner or later. Here's a list of current bugfixes:

• Made it possible to use a single symbol as a project short name. You can learn more about project short names from one of the previous releases. A short name used to contain from 2 to 4 characters.

• Fixed displaying of a "User's profile page" when a user does not have any projects.

• Fixed a "Story editing page".

• Fixed a link to an "Edit password page".

That's all for today. If you have any question regarding the release, feel free to contact us. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter not to miss future updates.

Riter development team