It's been almost two years since I announced that I'm working on version 2.0 of WebIssues. I even wrote an article on Medium about it. In fact, in the second half of 2018 it was almost finished. And then the unexpected happened. Just when I thought that the time of commercial side projects is over and I would be focusing on open-source projects again, Bulletcode got two big projects in a short time. So there's a 7-month long gap in the project's git log, not to mention that it took a while before I got back to full speed with WebIssues.
I usually applied the "release early and release often" approach to open-source projects, but this time it was such big technological leap that I decided to postpone the initial release until everything is finished, polished and tested. So even though the first version will be a "beta" version, the only thing that's really missing is the translations (by the way, please join the WebIssues project on Crowdin if you want to help). We're already using that beta version for our Bulletcode projects and everything works fine, but of course there is such diversity of platforms and configurations that it's impossible to catch every bug.
What can you expect from the new version? It has a completetly new user interface, not only when it comes to technology, but also the overall design. The well known tree of projects and folders is now gone; obviously you can still filter issues by project and folder, but the new UI is built around issue types and views. The native desktop client is also gone and replaced with an Electron application. Yes, I know, the desktop client was a major selling point of WebIssues, but it was also the main reason why it was so hard to make changes and introduce new features.
I tried to do my best to make the new application as lean and fast as possible, because like everyone else, I hate heavy and bloated single-page applications which are the reality of today's web. And, most importantly, it remains an open-source application that you can host on your own server, requiring nothing more than PHP and a database, because not everyone likes to store all their data in the cloud.
The first beta version will be available on March 2nd, so I encourage everyone to take a look and try it; there will be an online demo available. The official version will follow soon after, depending on how quickly the translations will be updated and how many bugs will be found.