In 2005 it was released as free and open source software under the GNU General Public License and a project to expand and improve it was begun, since then it has been downloaded over 40,000 times.

This has all been made possible thanks to contributions from more than sixty people, and now it has made twenty open source releases, has been translated into over 20 languages and is used in six continents.

SiT! started out being pre-printed paper forms, then later a Java program which was version 1 (sometime around 1998). SiT! v2 was a re-write in PHP3 and was a simple system in two parts though it did introduce the concept of contract management. v3 combined the two parts of v2 and added several modules that are still used today, like sites, contracts and user management, though of course they’ve been much improved since then.

Congratulations SiT!

This release is another maintenance, and it is highly recommended that you upgrade to this version.
 
 
 

• Security issues found by Yuri Goltsev, Positive Research Lab
• German help files are now translated thanks to Gabriele Pohl
• 100% Portuguese (Portugal) translations thanks to José Tomás & Luis Manuel Rodrigues

If you want to help in the development of SiT v3.90 (pre v4.0) please feel free to contact us.

The translation files have been updated for this release, so if you can translate, please feel free to help us here, no matter if it is only 1 string or a full translation, anything helps.

You can find us on IRC, contact us on the developers mailing list or translators mailing list which you can find here

The developers have worked hard this month, and will continue to do so, perhaps the beta will come sometime by the end of this month? Here’s a tip for you, follow the roadmap for the v3.90 release and you’ll be able to track progress. At the time of the writing we’re almost at 60% done.

• Something new, is that a developer day has been introduced. The developer day is a day where developers meet in on IRC (#sit on freenode) to, amongst other things; discuss issues, code, brainstorm ideas, mentor SiT hackers & plugin programmers and whom ever wants to contribute to SiT, and in general have an enjoyable day with everyone on IRC, everyone who is interested is welcome of course. The day in mention will be the first Saturday of every month, we are a friendly bunch and we don’t bite.

Several plugins have been updated since the last news update, so why don’t you check out our plugins repository?

I’d also say a thank you to José Tomás who has helped us with the Portuguese (Portugal) translations and a special thank you to Rob Beckett (aka subwolf) who made his first code contributions to SiT! this week after a sabbatical due to illness, Rob has long been a regular contributor to the fun we have on IRC.

Some of the improvements are:

• Better language support for right-to-left reading/writing
• MySQL 5.5 support
• German de-DE Gabriele Pohl & Raffael Luthiger really improved this one
• Russian ru-RU is now again 100% thanks to Алексей Назаров
• Polish pl-PL is added and now 90% thanks to Tom Kapelko & Urszula Gola
• Persian/Farsi fa-IR is added and now 90% thanks to Mahdi Heidari

You can read the release notes here: release notes 3.63

Next release will be the v3.90 which will be a pre v4.0 release which we decided to call v3.90 as it doesn’t contain all the features we want for 4.0.

We’ve released SiT 3.63 in a beta version, get it here. There have been many bug fixes and most important of all security fixes, thanks to Knud Erik from nsense research for finding these. So please download a copy and help us test it.

Plugins

We have made a plugin repository for your convenience, here you can find the latest releases of a plugin without being afraid of downloading a broken one. The url is here : http://sourceforge.net/projects/sit-plugins/ , just click on files in the menu. If you sign up to the RSS feeds you’ll get notifications when a new plugin is added or when one existing is updated. This is actually a great chance to use the RSS dashlet already shipping with SiT!.

There have been added quite a few updates to plugins and dashlets, and also some cool new plugins. I suggest you take a look at the Plugins Directory in the wiki to see if there is anything that you can use.

Some really useful ones are the Tms Log and the Incident Summary

• The Tms Log will give you a nice page where you can view the debug log file and clean it if required.
• The Incident Summary Will display the summary of an incident on the incident details page, you’ll have a possibility to easily edit this too. The summary will then be saved in the summary field when closing the incident.

Tutorial

A new tutorial has been added, this one is a, how to expand storage in the VM of SiT! this can, with a few modifications, also be used for a regular Ubuntu using LVM but that’s not explained in the video.

We are soon entering 2011, which we hope will be a very good year for you.

As a new year present to you I’ve uploaded a new plugin; tms_log, which is a log file viewer.
Though you will not be able to use it.

- Why not? you may ask.
Well the minimum version is for SiT v3.63

- But the v3.63 hasn’t even been released yet.
Thats why I’ve made a special release of the plugin v0.99 which is supported back to v3.50, it has a minor change to let it support the older versions, otherwise it’s the same (just make sure that you upgrade the plugin when you upgrade SiT)

- Where can I get it?
In our Plugins repository

Don’t forget to add to your rss-news reader about new/updated plugins

We’ve got only a few bits of news for you at this time, this is unfortunately due to the developers being very busy meeting deadlines after deadlines at their work, which has resulted in postponing the release of v4.0.
So if you are a developer and would like to help out, please join us at IRC and lets have a talk.

We’ve got some great news too.
We got some improved Dutch translations with better wordings, thanks to Arko Kroonen & Jasper van der Marel.
Vasilios Karageorgis started on the Greek translations and is now over 50%

After alot of work, we finally got SiT into the BSD ports system which makes it easier to install on BSD.
A quick guide is added to our wiki for installing SiT Port

We’ve created a plugins repository, which runs as a test. This should be more user friendly than downloading from SVN.
Take a look here to view the plugins listing.
Don’t forget to add the RSS feed
We would appreciate any feedback in our forum so we can improve our service to you.

The news update this month are few but regardless we do have some news for you.

SiT 3.62 was released 18th of July fixing a lot of bugs, read the release notes.
This release will probably be the last release before SiT 4.0 is released, don’t worry, we will continue the v3.x branch until around v4.2.

Due to the fact that there will be no new features directly in the 3.x releases, you might see new features anyway, in the shape of plugins.
During the past year a lot of plugins and dashlets has been created, these contributions might even find their way into the SiT core in v4.x, so one could see these as being test features.

The plugins also show how easy it can be to add own features to SiT! without having the terror of overwriting the self-made code when upgrading.

Recruitments
If you are a PHP programmer and you would like to help us, you are welcome to join our IRC and/or look in our developers wiki.

We are also looking for experienced artists, so if you are one, or know someone who would be interested, feel free to contact us (preferable on IRC or email to Project leader Ivan Lucas).

New/updated Plugins
As always, Nicdev007 has made improvements to the Auto create with tags plugin.
For those who are not familiar with this plugin, I can make a short description of it. When a mail from an unknown contact enters SiT!, this plugin autocreates the contact, it checks the email domain and binds the contact to this site. It also checks for duplicates.

As an addition to my previous plugin, the tms add timeused where you can add an amount of time spent on an incident, when closing the incident, I’ve created a generic plugin that can easily be modified to suit your needs, the tms customfield close. This plugin adds a custom field to the close incident page, the custom field can be renamed to what you want.
Any support, tips, suggestions are welcome here in our forums

As a sneak peak I can present a plugin manager which basically, when it’s finished, helps you install plugins, show upgrades, enable/disable them etc. When finished this will be a great addition to SiT!

If you want to see more plugins, take a look in our Plugins directory

The release day for SiT! v3.62 is closing in to be released soon, when? Some insider knowledge suggests within the next 3 weeks. But lets see.

Translations
We’ve had the fortune of getting Romanian translations, on the day of writing its alittle more than 52% translated with more to come all thanks to Adrian Cristinici.
We also got a large chunk of Catalan (ca_ES) from Jeff Stone
Some rumours tells us that a Lithuanian translation is on it’s way.
We are very fortunate to have 18 languages that are more than 50% translated.

Plugins
The list this month is a long one
dashboard_group_incidents : Shows all open incidents for a group
feedback_verify : Before sending feedback to a user, verify if he is allowed to receive it
user_added_triggervariables_triggertypes : Plugin to add user defined trigger variables and trigger actions
tms_add_timeused : Simply adds, a field for entering time used on an incident, when closing it.
And as always our dear contributer Nico ‘Bushmand’ du Toit keeps updating the auto_create_tags it’s now version 1.87

Some statistics
Since last monthly news we’ve gotten 10 new forum members with more than double as many topics.
We are very pleased to see more and more people are interested in our work.
It seems lately that less and less bugs are found, which is very good for all of us. If you do find one, please let us know so we can make SiT! even better (report to http://bugs.sitracker.org).

Since no new features will be added to the v3.x branch, I can well tell you that that doesn’t stop the expansion of the v3.x branch, many new features can be added using plugins. If you want to expand v3.x you can write your own plugins or get help from someone it’s quite easy, and I would know, I’m a total noob at programming, but yet I’ve ended up with making the tms_backup and it’s dashlet, and tms_add_timeused. The last was on a request from a user.
And as an addition, some of these plugins might even be implemented into the v4.x branch.

Now that the summer vacation is comming, we’ll can have a break from work that takes away our precious time from SiT! so you might see alot of SiT! activity during the next few months.

I want to encourage you to visit our forum and submit a vote for the poll we would love to hear your oppinion regarding our manual. Also let us know how we can improve our tutorials.

Unfortunately as many of you might have experienced, SiT 3.61 hasn’t been released yet though it was scheduled to have been released the 9th this month. This is due to the fact that still a few bugs needs to be fixed, and the developers are very busy for the time being. Hopefully it will be released within the next 2 weeks, but I cannot promise anything at the moment.
Bug 1204 is a tricky one, and is the one that we are waiting to finish.
We do have some good news though,

Translations
Jeff Stone has been very busy translating the remaining Welsh so we have 100% on that, started on Norsk Bokmål, and made some Catalan
The Mexican Spanish has also been completed thanks to Josías Galván Reyes
Brazilian Portuguese has been updated thanks to Fernando Suzarte Schiavon
Russian has been updated and is almost 100% thanks to Sancho78rus

Big thanks to you guys

Plugins
Our dear contributer and hang-around Nicdev007 has added a useful dashlet that shows ALL incidents in a select group.
This is on a forum request. You can read more about the plugin in our wiki
Also he has continued updating the Auto create with tags plugin which is now v1.80, this one now handles plugins on its own aswell. A new great feature is that it has the ability to auto create a new contact if he/she is unknown to SiT, by searching LDAP.

Tutorials
This time I’ve managed to create an install video tutorial, unfortunately youtube managed to reduce the quality, so you can’t actually see the text written. I’ll work to get the file put for download, if I’m successful it’ll have a link from our wiki.