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This month, we announce two new User Groups and two new case studies, FedEx Day projects and a Codegeist voting opportunity. When you finish reading the newsletter, please let us know if you liked this extensive coverage. Cheers, and happy reading!
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Codegeist: Cast Your Vote Now
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We're giving an additional $1,000 cash prize to the Codegeist Contest entry given the most votes by you, the Atlassian community. This year's contest just ended and all the winners will be announced next month.
To choose your favourite plugin, review the entries on the submissions page, where you'll see an overview with a short description and a screenshot from each plugin. Or, view individual product submits:
Criteria to consider includes usefulness, creativity & elegance, completeness and code quality and documentation. Vote now before the poll closes on Monday, May 28th at 12:00pm, San Francisco time (PDT/GMT+8).
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New Case Studies to Share
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This month we have a couple new case studies to share:
- GigaSpaces chose Confluence over RoboHelp for technical documentation and online help. By using the wiki, the company dramatically improved the user experience of finding and reading documentation. Read the full case study.
Check out all the Confluence and JIRA case studies.
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FexEx Episode V: The XMPP Strikes Back
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Last week we held Atlassian's fifth "Fedex". Originally Fedex Day, the new expanded Fedex gives all developers at Atlassian a day and a half work on anything they like, provided they can deliver it for demonstration at the end of Friday. The best (peer-voted) project wins a small prize and some of these projects will find their way into the products themselves as fully fledged features.
Below we've categorised some of the FedEx projects according to product. By clicking on the project, you'll see a full explanation of the problem, the solution and the process of getting from A to B. Some screenshots and videos are also embedded. Enjoy!!
Confluence projects:
- Configurable user repositories: The goal of this project was to provide a pluggable user repository layer for Confluence that allows dynamic configuration of repositories for users, groups and properties associated with these. (Whew! That was a mouthful.) In essence what it means is while Confluence can retrieve users and groups from a few different places at the moment, we'd like to make it easier to use and extend this functionality. (Matt Ryall, Confluence Developer)
- Copy space plugin: This plugin allows a Confluence space to be copied. I choose this partially in response to the existence of CONF-3191, but more so because the workaround is horrible. Occasionally, when I've been working in support, I've been asked about how to copy a space, and it always makes me cringe. (Don Willis, Confluence Developer)
- HTML differences between Confluence page versions: I chose to implement HTML version diffs for Confluence. In the wiki, you can compare the different versions of the same page, so that you can determine exactly what has been added and deleted. The existing markup that shows this isn't always very clear — I set out to clarify this. (Tom Davies, Confluence Developer)
- Chatrooms in Confluence: The first challenge was simply committing myself to a single idea. Eventually (after a few single class prototypes) I settled on the challenge of trying to integrate chatrooms into Confluence. After a few trade offs, I think this actually ended up turning out brilliantly — far better than I had expected up front! (Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian Co-Founder)
- Filtering spam comments in Confluence: Some Confluence instances are public and allow anonymous comments. By doing so you face one major problem: spam. A solution is to use Confluence CAPTCHA to identify whether the comment is truly legit. This, however, is not really accessible. Another solution would be to use a spam filter and I decided to give it a go for my project. (Sam Le Berrigaud, Confluence Developer)
- Ordering pages within Confluence: Currently in Confluence there is no way for the user to order pages within its tree (ordered by title by default). The ability to order pages would be a useful feature for html/pdf exports. CONF-1031 is a very highly voted for feature with 99 votes and also something I wanted so I could correctly produce my thesis report. (Agnes Ro, Confluence Developer)
- Staging plugin: A month or two ago, in response to the fact that a lot of people use Confluence to create documentation, and are asking for particularly un-wiki-like features like workflow and approval, I wrote up a more collaboration-friendly spec for a Document Staging plugin. This plugin would allow people to collaborate on documentation in one space and then publish it to another space when it was ready. (If you set up permissions so people who can write in the staging space can't write to the public space, hey presto, you've got an ad hoc publishing workflow.) (Charles Miller, Confluence Architect)
JIRA projects:
- Moving issues between JIRA instances: Have you ever been bothered by the fact that there's no easy way to move issues between JIRA instances? You create a new issue on one JIRA server only to realise that it should have been created on another JIRA server. This is probably something that users of Atlassian support encounter occasionally when they register issues on jira.atlassian.com instead of support.atlassian.com and vice versa. As my Fedex Day V project I decided to right this wrong (cue heroic music). (Hamish Barney, JIRA Developer)
- Enhanced ZIP support for JIRA: Adding the ability to browse ZIP files in JIRA would prove invaluable to support teams (for when users attach a bunch of diagnostic files in a ZIP) and could potentially change the way a lot of customers user JIRA. Instead of attaching one file at a time, a user could potentially attach a single ZIP with all of the files related to an issue — saving time, frustration and disk space. I took this task on. (Tim Pettersen, Developer)
- Sieve mail processing: JIRA has a very useful mail integration system that allows issues to be created and commented on via email. While this works well for the simple case there is a lot more information in the mail that we receive from both automated support requests and direct customer conversations that we could feed into JIRA issues. Rather than hard-code the extraction of this information into JIRA itself, my project was to produce general configurable, extensible system for processing incoming mail, allowing us to classify messages based on key phrases and tags in the mail text. (Steve Smith, Systems Administrator)
- Chat interface to JIRA: Sometimes you just want to quickly comment on an issue or check its status and you don't want to open a browser window, browse to the issue, enter the text, click submit, etc. Thus, the chat interface to JIRA was born. My Fedex project was to create a plugin that would allow JIRA to listen via XMPP based Chat for different commands. (Dylan Etkin, JIRA Developer)
- Adding JIRA issues to a personalised Google page: Google allows its users to customise their home pages and calls it iGoogle. For my Fedex project, I decided to create a plugin that would integrate JIRA with JIRA Issues Google Gadget. This plugin would enable a one-click operation, making it easy to add the filter of your JIRA issues right onto to your personalised Google Home page (up to 10 issues). (Dushan Hanuska, JIRA Developer)
More FedEx Day projects:
- Social Network Analysis of Atlassian Blogs: I wrote an application to extract social interaction data from internal Atlassian blog posts and perform several types of Social Network Analysis. Social Network Analysis uses graph theory algorithms to study social relationships among individuals. (Soren Harner, Director of Engineering)
- Atlassian Sonar: Sorry, it isn't a new product but rather a new way to navigate around our products and do things. Or more accurately, it will be if the right people are impressed by my Fedex Day toy. It is a cross between Quicksilver and a command line with AutoComplete with a lot of AJAXy sugar. While I implemented this in JIRA, it could be pulled out and inserted into all the other products quite easily. If we had plugable plugins, it could be a fully contained plugin, with each product supplying it's own extensions. (Nick Menere, JIRA Developer)
- Sage 2.0: Sage is our search engine that powers http://search.atlassian.com. Its interface needed to be asynchronous. Also all resources should be organised in tabs, such that users could navigate to the resource of their choice with a simple click. Finally the UI needed a major facelift (to be provided by our UI team). Forum queries also had to be resurrected. (Andreas Knecht, JIRA Developer)
Visit our Developer Blog for more.
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Boston and San Francisco User Groups Coming Up
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We're holding a 1/2 day Atlassian user group in Boston on June 21st, and one in the SF Bay Area on June 28th, and you're invited to participate. This is a great opportunity to meet other Atlassian customers and learn about best practices for using JIRA, Confluence, Crowd and Bamboo.
Did we mention that we're looking for speakers?!
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Get your Wikipatterns button!
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Now you can stylishly tell everyone about your favourite wiki resource — add a Wikipatterns button to your blog, website or wiki!
Displaying a button is a great way to let others know about Wikipatterns, the community website that helps everyone contribute and find strategies for growing wiki collaboration.
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Thanks for Reading
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Did you enjoy the extensive FedEx Day coverage? Please, vote here to let us know!
Cheers!
Your mates at Atlassian
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Other ways to keep on top of what's happening at Atlassian:
 Read or subscribe to our blogs
 See what everyone's talking about on the Atlassian product forums
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