Hi All,

OpenMRS 1.6 Beta 2 is now ready for testing. You can get it here.

Assuming no major bugs, we should have the release candidate out in a week. We’re looking for one implementation (in addition to AMPATH, who has generously offered) to test out the release candidate in production, so we can be totally sure it’s stable. Let me know if you’re interested in that being you.

-Darius

Hi All,

Thanks to everyone who tested our alpha release of 1.6, we’re releasing 1.6 Beta. You can get it on the downloads page.

We’ve made only two significant changes since the alpha:

• We’ve implemented “core modules” properly, meaning that we may now have modules that are required by core, and OpenMRS will not start up if they are not present. (The purpose is to make it easier for feature development to happen independently. Logic is the only one of these at the moment.)
• We had switched the role name from “System Developer” to “Administrator” but we’ve switched that back. It will change to Administrator again in the future, but not until we have added an integer primary key to the table so that we may correctly rename the role, instead of deleting and re-adding it. (Thanks Mark Goodrich for testing with the Patient Flags module and catching this.)

You can see the additional trivial changes in the release notes.

We still need to see some further testing of Beta release before we’re ready to move onto a release candidate. And I’m actually going on vacation for a week. So…go ahead and test away so that when I get back we’ll be all set to release.

-Darius

Thanks to a big contribution from the Millennium Villages Project and Andreas Kollegger, we now have a richer way of representing concept names. You can read more about this here.

So with that big change, we’re drawing a line in the sand and releasing OpenMRS 1.4 beta. You can find that on the pre-releases page.

This is Beta, so expect bugs. I’d love it if people install this, try it out, and let me know about any issues that come up. Just create a trac ticket, and cc it to djazayeri. I will be your friendly neighborhood Release Manager for 1.4.

So how long until this is ready for production use? Good question. A few releases down the road, we intend to have a more structured QA strategy. But for the moment, testing is going to be ad-hoc. The PIH sites in Rwanda, Malawi, and Lesotho are running this in production now, perhaps unwisely, so we’ll be finding some of the bugs. (In fact we’ve already found and fixed many.) Other testers will find more. Over the next month, as we fix those bugs, we’ll progress to releasing this as a Release Candidate. I’d hope this happens by mid-January, but that’s a wild guess. It could be faster, it could be slower.