Topic View and Subscriptions for Project Discussions

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We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software last week. But, before we get into the new functionality…

Welcome our new Program Manager, Ada Cole

Hello, CodePlex users!  My name is Ada Cole, and I’m excited to be the Program Manager on the CodePlex Team!  Over the last couple of weeks, I have enjoyed so much - helping to develop the new feature below, learning more about open source, and working with a high-performance development and test team in an agile environment.

The best part, though, has been discovering all the ways in which the voice of our users influences the site on a daily basis.  Everyone on the team has a passion for delivering a great customer experience. Customer insights and comments are an integral part of everything we do.    I am looking forward to having more conversations with you, the CodePlex users, and involving you even more in the future of CodePlex.

If you will be at PDC, I hope you will be able to join me and some of the team for an Open Source social discussion on Thursday, Oct. 28.   You can reach me any time on twitter (@adacole_msft) or by email (adacole@microsoft.com) if you are able to attend our PDC town hall, or if there is anything you'd like to discuss.

Topic View and Subscriptions for Project Discussions

With this release, we have enabled a new all-up discussions view in response to the popular request for a way to segment discussions.

Topic View will show a list of topics (previously known as tags) and allow users to drill down by topic to view associated discussions. This feature enables project owners to organize a high volume discussions list or to easily separate discussions across discrete topics so all users can focus specifically on areas of interest, similar to the concept of sub-forums.

A project’s discussions page now has two options. Classic View keeps things the same, and topics remain optional. Topic View is opt-in, and will require users to tag discussions with one or more topics. New projects will have discussion pages set to Topic View by default, but the page will display in Classic View until the two ore more topics have been defined.

To change the view of your project, go to Discussions and click on the “Edit Discussion Details” link. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select the Topic View radio button and click Save. If you currently do not have any topics, you can easily add them by entering the desired name and clicking Add Topic.

Once the Topic View is selected, and users start creating discussions, the discussions list will start to look like the following:

Note: Until you have defined two or more topics, the users will continue to see discussions in Classic View.

The first time you switch to Topic View, all discussions that have not been assigned a topic will be associated with the system tag, “General”. You can migrate discussions out of “General” by editing each discussion and selecting the appropriate topic(s). If you are already using “General”, unassociated discussions will be found under the existing “General” topic.

We have also added the ability to subscribe to email notifications at a topic level. When you have selected a topic, the issue notification box on the right hand side will now be in the context of the currently selected topic. Clicking the “get email notifications” link will open a dialog allowing you to select immediate delivery, daily digest, or unsubscribe completely.

Note: Should you already be subscribed at the project level, you will be unable to subscribe to a topic since you are already receiving notifications for all topics.

The system topic “General” does not allow subscriptions because users will not be able to associate future discussions with “General”. To receive notifications for replies to these discussions, you should instead subscribe to project level notifications.

As you use the new Topic View, please send feedback our way so we can continue to improve it!