My Opera Development

Today we released a bunch of fixes for My Opera. Before I go into the details, I would like to describe the workflow we use for developing My Opera. It can be categorized into three types: Hot fixes, bug packages and tasks.

Hot fixes should be fixed as soon as possible. They have the highest priority at any given point in time, and our developers are always looking into these whenever they come in. An example of a hot fix was when groups could not edit album details earlier this week. This was examined, fixed and released within a couple of hours after it was discovered.

When fixes aren't all that hot, they get batched up and stacked into bug packages. The bug packages contain between 10 and 20 fixes which several developers are working on together. A bug package is generally scheduled to run for a two week period, but it could take more or less time depending on the intricacy of the fixes. Before the bug packages are sent live, they go through a testing period where the fixes are verified, for the most part by other developers than the one fixing them.

The last category is feature development and tasks. These usually take longer than two weeks to implement, and are not wanted in bug packages as they can easily delay the release. An example of a task is when we added support for Facebook's new API some weeks ago. We also have some umbrella tasks, such as infrastructure maintenance, and continuous tasks, such as integration and deployment.

Today's release was a bug package. Here's the changelog:

• Finally, timestamps for user content are localized according to language selection!
• The date format was different between blog posts and comments, and has now been fixed.
• E-mail subscriptions to content is now enabled by default for newly registered users.
• Fixed some e-mail notifications not being sent under certain conditions.
• Fixed localization problem on Polish translations for blog post comments.
• The zip smiley is no longer as worried as before.
• A warning is now shown at the rename account page that content linked from within blog posts will still point to the old username.
• Password recovery mails were broken by some e-mail clients. An HTML template is now sent as well to ensure that the link for password recovery is not broken.
• The “Limit search to certain forums” field was not populated on certain group forum pages.
• Blog posts with no title containing only an image is now giving a suggested title in the news feed.
• <abbr> now has a default style.
• Entities are no longer double encoded in blog search results.
• Shoutbox entries now show the user's username when no full name is entered.
• The popular blogs page now contains fresher content.
• A published/draft status is added to Metaweblog getRecentPosts responses.
• The text is no longer broken on the album upload form when the album title contains a single quote.
• The mynews.dml panel no longer yields a 403 Forbidden response when attempting to mark all as read.
• We also have numerous internal fixes that would bore you to tears to read.