Search Project Openings, New Ad Format, and more

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We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software today.

Project Openings Enhancements

With today’s release, CodePlex users now have the ability to search for project openings across all projects. Prior to today’s release, a user looking to contribute to projects that were requesting help required knowing about those specific projects. This feature is not limited to just developers, but any resource a project could be looking for (ie, testers, designers, editors).

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When visiting the CodePlex site, clicking on the Project Openings link will direct you to a listing of projects with openings sorted with the most recent openings first. What you’ll notice, is the layout is similar to the Project Directory, except that opening descriptions are displayed in green text above the project description.

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Clicking on the “Join this Project” link will direct you to the homepage of the project with the request dialog open and ready for your submission.

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Another difference you’ll notice is how tagging is handled with project openings. As a project coordinator, you can tag your project opening with specific keywords. When CodePlex users visit the project openings page, they can utilize the tags specified to refine the results.

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Ad Format Change

For projects that have The Lounge ads enabled, you will notice that larger 300 x 250 pixel ads are being displayed on the project’s pages. Just as adding the larger ads to a downloads page, increasing the ad size across the project will dramatically increase the ad revenue for project owners to better support their project (or charity contributions to Habitat for Humanity Int’l).

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Fork Actions on Changeset Listing Page

After the recent release of the ability to view a fork’s changeset listing directly within CodePlex, we wanted to make managing forks as easy as possible. With today’s release, all fork actions are now available directly on the changeset listing page. No longer will you need to jump back to the listing of forks to send a pull request, apply/decline a pull request, or even delete a fork.

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Silverlight 4 Support

The CodePlex wiki has been upgraded to support Silverlight 4 by default. Existing Silverlight applications hosted on CodePlex should continue to work due to built-in backwards compatibility. Should you need to explicitly specify the version for your Silverlight application, add the “version=3” parameter to your macro (you can also specify “version=2”).