Another month and another long series of updates to Nova.  While slow at the start, March went out with a bang with some major stuff being wrapped up.  An interesting note for those that care: it took us 489 days to commit 787 changes to SMS, but it’s only taken us 215 days to commit 742 revisions to Nova.  That means over the life of the SMS repository, we’ve commited, on average, 1.6 changes per day compared to 3.4 changes per day for Nova.  On to the report though.  The following report covers revs 593 through 742.

• Updates for the M3 release (player data, user panel, login template)
• [Bug] Player’s choice for rank wasn’t put into the session
• Updated installation so whatever’s put in the sim name is automatically populated in the email subject field
• If a player whose email address is already in the system uses the join page, it only inserts a new character and not a new player record
• Removed rounded form elements
• Updated head logos to M4 branding
• Updated version info to M4
• [Bug] Rank was displayed twice on the chain of command page
• Major work on the admin template
• Added the ability to do a partial authorization check to the Auth library
• Added site messages page (adding, editing and deleting messages)
• Added site settings page (adding, editing and deleting settings)
• Updated to jQuery UI 1.7.1
• Added a _base_override directory to give skin developers and admins more control over their skins
• Changed buttons in admin section to have a main color (blue) and a secondary color (gray)
• [Bug] Nova doesn’t respect settings for whether or not to use large award images
• Added access role pages (editing and deleting … adding to come)
• Added info AJAX boxes to explain some of the more confusing items on the settings page
• Added icons to use throughout the admin system
• Added adaptive menus in the admin system … the active section is at the top now
• [Bug] Select menus in Facebox don’t have proper styling allowances
• Updating the schema
• Added bio fields/sections/tabs management page
• Added tour fields management page
• Added specs fields/sections management page
• Updated the documentation
• Updated the menu library to take access role into account
• Rewrote flash message code to make the language file more efficient
• [Bug] Method get_character_name() doesn’t have a data sanity check
• Updated genre files to make sure that character data lines up with test post data
• Re-ordered the controller methods to be in alphabetical order after the index method
• Built chain of command management page that uses drag and drop and complete AJAX to update the COC on the fly without reloading the page

That’s it for March.  We’ve already done some awesome stuff in the first couple days of April, so stay tuned!

As a bonus, we’re going to start releasing month development builds so people can get their hands dirty with the latest and greatest.  Today is the first month we’re going to do it and on subsequent months, we’ll release it the same day we release the checkin update.  You can grab the latest development build from http://nova.anodyne-productions.com.