Custom project templates on the instance level
In today’s fast-growing development environment, moving from an idea to setting up a new project from scratch is still a tedious task. There’s not only a lot of boilerplate code involved, but also additional administrative overhead preventing your users from getting started right away.
Starting with this release, we enable organizations to manage their own project templates. As a GitLab admin, you can now define a group within your installation that serves as source for custom templates. All direct child projects of this group are available as templates when creating a new project.
All relevant repository and database information of a template are copied over to your new project, including the project and wiki repository, issues, project configuration, and more.
Personal status messages
Collaboration is a core principle within the GitLab product. When using GitLab day-to-day, together with your colleagues and community, it can be helpful to communicate what you are up to, including your availability or current workload.
With GitLab 11.2, we are bringing status messages right to your personal profile! Within your profile settings, you can now add a status including an emoji and custom message. This status will show up on your profile page, as well as in comments and author titlebars, exposing your current status to everyone who is working with you.
Thank you Luke Niedermyer for your initial contribution!
Improved top-navigation search
As instances grow, projects and groups can multiply and become increasingly hard to find, so GitLab requires a powerful search experience. In this release, we’re taking a step forward to make search clearer, more consistent, and easier than ever to use.
In 11.2, we’re improving search by removing project and group scoping from the search bar. Instead of restricting search to the project/group you’re in, GitLab now gives you a consistent experience with the ability to search instance-wide from the top of every page.
We’ve also made search easier to use by showing group and project icons in the results, plus expanding the width of the search bar accordingly.
Support for Android project import
Until now, importing complex project structures with multiple sub-structures was a tedious, time-consuming task.
With this release, we introduce support for manifest files for project imports. A manifest XML file contains metadata for groups of repositories, allowing you to import larger project structures with multiple repositories in one go.
When creating a new project, there is a new option to choose a “Manifest file” as source of your project import on the “Import project” tab. In addition, you can select from the list of individual projects in a subsequent step if you don’t want to import the complete project structure.
This improvement allows you to import the Android OS code from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), as one exciting use case. You can also import other projects that use manifest files which meet our format requirements.
Issue board milestone lists
Issue boards were originally designed to support workflow tracking with label-based lists. In GitLab 11.0, we introduced assignee lists to help teams see issues assigned to different team members and allow quick reassignments.
With this release, we are introducing a third type of list, the milestone list. All issues assigned to the given milestone will appear in a milestone list. This allows teams to see issues in different milestones all at once in a single board with multiple milestone lists. This also means you can quickly move issues across different milestones. With the summed weights feature also in this release, this is especially useful for teams who want to balance total issue weight across milestones, not over-scoping or under-scoping in a given milestone.
We’ve also updated the API so that you can now add and remove all three types of lists on a given board.
