Mozilla has announced the official release of Bugzilla 3.2, a significant new version that adds a large number of major improvements.

Bugzilla is web-based issue tracking system that is distributed under the Mozilla Public License and is written in the Perl scripting language. It is used extensively by Mozilla and has also been adopted by a large number of other prominent open source software projects including GNOME, KDE, and OpenOffice.org.

The new version includes a much richer theming engine and a new default theme called Dusk. It also includes significant usability improvements that were implemented in collaboration with NASA's Human-Computer Interaction department. There are a lot of really nice minor user interface enhancements, such as support for collapsing and expanding comments in bug reports.

This release offers some new custom field types, including a new date field with a JavaScript calendar widget. Installation has also been simplified by a new script that automatically manages installation of all major dependencies. Oracle contributed code to enable support for using Bugzilla with an Oracle database backend. There were also a lot of other notable improvements that will benefit users and administrators.

In a status update about the release, Bugzilla developer Max Kanat-Alexander shares his views about the 3.2 release and the roadmap for the next major version.

"3.2 has a lot of new features. In many ways, this is one of the releases that we've put the most 'polish' into. After conquering a lot of major obstacles and doing lots of code clean-up to prepare for the Bugzilla 3.0 series, we were finally able to focus on a lot of usability issues and annoyances that we've always wanted to fix," he wrote. "For Bugzilla 4.0, our focus is inter-Bugzilla communication and integration. That is, the ability for other tools to talk to Bugzilla, and for two Bugzilla installations to talk to each other."

For more information about this release, check out the official release notes. If you want to see the new features in action, you can try them out at the Landfill, a Bugzilla testing installation.