Announcing our first Beta release of Ushahidi v3

It’s been a couple of months since we shared what progress we’ve been making on Ushahidi v3. Today, we’re rolling out a beta version of Ushahidi v3, v3.0.0-beta.1. Always good to point out that, v3 is STILL not quite ready for production, and this is still largely a developer release. Not to worry though, you can still demo what we have right now on our demo site.

What’s changed?

We’ve made a couple of improvements to the system, since our alpha release in December, including:

Increased test coverage of server code

Robust user authentication workflow

Switched to using Gravatars for user icons

Consistency in sorting search results

Editing functionality for tags, users etc improved

More visual and workflow improvements

One of the other major changes that’s worth mentioning, is the introduction of Phabricator into our development process. We’ve been using it for a couple of months now, to help with managing of tasks, as well as help us build out v3 better. To get access, please head over to the Ushahidi Phabricator page and sign up. Once your account is approved, here’s a guide to get you started.

What’s New?

PHP 5.4 is now the minimum version required

We’ve switched to using Composer and Bower to manage dependencies

You can now search posts by date range and multiple tags

You can also change tags' icon and color

A message viewer prototype added

Users can also toggle partially completed features in site settings:

drag and drop media uploads for posts

organize posts into user-defined groups

inspect calls and responses to the backend API

enable and configure data provider settings

set default map options

edit custom post forms

What should I expect in the near future?

In the lead up to a full product launch, we plan on having regular releases every two weeks. Review our roadmap on Phabricator to keep yourself updated.

Documentation

We know that it’s been a bit of a pain getting set up on v3, so we’ve made some improvements and updates. Head on over to the wiki to have a look

Initial set up and installation

Mac OSX and Homebrew Set up

Windows set up

Thank you!!

Huge thanks go out to Cam MacDonell and his software development class who jumped in on installing v3 and helped us streamline our installation process, and to Neil Horning and Daniel Spaude for their continued feedback.

How Can I help?

Download and Install the platform

Set up a development build

Follow our developer processes to submit changes

Join in on our discussions

IRC –  irc://irc.freenode.net#ushahidi

on our Mailing lists – send an empty email to community-subscribe@list.ushahidi.com (for non technical folks) or developers-subscribe@list.ushahidi.com for the technical folks

Help us improve our documentation

Have you installed v3 on Ubuntu?

Have you installed v3 on Windows?

Join us for a v3 Demo!

As much as this release is heavily targeted towards developers, we welcome feedback from non-devs, especially our deployers and community designers. We recently held a meetup in Nairobi, with productive brainstorming sessions on how to better visualise data on the platform, as well as how to manage workflows.   Please join us for a virtual demo walkthrough and Q&A with core devs on Thursday, June 19th at 1.30 p.m PST. We will also record this session for those who may not be able to attend. We plan on hosting virtual and physical meetups a lot more frequently within the next few months, and welcome any feedback/thoughts on what topics you would like to discuss. Feel free to reach out to us. In the meantime, stay tuned on our blog, meetup page, twitter, facebook page and wiki for more announcements, Happy v3 beta release day!!