SUMO 0.8

A couple of weeks ago, the bug fixes for SUMO 0.8 were pushed to
support.mozilla.com. This update has quite a few goodies!

New search engine

Over the summer, student Alexandre Michelis and mentor Nelson Ko worked on a Google Summer of Code project to create a search engine specifically for SUMO. In SUMO 0.8, the back-end code for the new search engine was implemented. After many months of hard work, we just need to do some final testing, then we are going to switch over to the new search engine. When that happens, we’ll post in detail of all the great advantages of the new search engine.

Support for Firefox 3.1 specific content

In the Firefox Support Knowledge Base, we use a great feature called “SHOWFOR” that allows articles to display different content, depending on the users’ operating system and version of Firefox. When it comes to version numbers, we have only been able to differentiate between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 content. Now I am pleased to announce that we can now differentiate between Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.1! For more information on how it works, and updating articles for Firefox 3.1, you can read the previous blog post.

Template for new articles

So you’ve decided to create a new article. Great! But you open the article editor to start writing the article, and don’t really know how to format the article. We now have pre-filled markup and text in the article editor when creating a new article, that includes where to put the problem and solution, but how to format the problem and solution. This should make it easier for people to get involved, as well as improve the continuity of Knowledge Base articles. And….it’s localizable! I’ll be in contact with Firefox Support locale leaders with instructions, and if you don’t want to wait, email me or comment on this blog post.

Secure log in

When you log in or register, it is done through a secure (https) connection.

Forum performance

There has been quite a bit of work done to improve the performance of the forums, which has been a major issue.

There are more highlights that we post about soon. In all, SUMO 0.8 is the without a doubt the most significant SUMO release; and the SUMOdev team deserves a big applause for working so hard. You can see a full list of SUMO 0.8 bug fixes in Bugzilla. Remember that if you see any bugs on support.mozilla.com or you think of a great new feature for the web site, please let us know about it in the Contributors Forum or file a bug in Bugzilla.