It feels like yesterday that we wrapped up the first release of Review Board 2.5. Surprisingly, it's actually been 2 years, and we've been busy in that time building the next major evolution of Review Board, 3.0.

That version is here, and with it comes new integrations for third-party services, automated code review support, new review capabilities, better discussions, and oh so much more.

It's a big release. Let's take a look at the major features.

Review Board now talks to your other services (like Slack!)

One of the focuses of this release was to help Review Board work with the other tools you use every day. For this, we've developed a new integrations feature that can talk to all sorts of things, like:

Chat services (Slack, and soon Stride and Mattermost)

Continuous Integration services (Travis CI and CircleCI)

Automated code review services (Review Bot, coming soon)

Project/task management services (Asana and Trello, also coming soon).

You can create as many integration configurations as you need, directing updates for different teams to different Slack channels, or using different tools for different repositories.

More integrations are coming soon, and extension authors can build their own.

Do more with reviews

Your reviews can contain general comments, which aren't tied to any particular file, and are useful for pointing out higher-level issues with a change (missing screenshots, typos in the description, architectural problems, or anything else).

We're introducing optional issue verification, which ensures an issue can't be resolved and the change landed until the reviewer has verified the fix.

Filed a Ship It! accidentally, or maybe it no longer applies? You can now revoke your Ship It! at any time.

Add some flavor to your comments with Emoji shortcodes. These work on any database (unlike Unicode Emojis), and are largely compatible with Slack and GitHub's Emoji sets.

To share a mockup, meme, or other images in your comments, you can drag-and-drop images into text fields. This works with any Markdown-capable text field in the product.

Need to hand off a review request to another developer? Owners of a review request (and administrators) can now re-assign ownership of a review request.

We've improved discussions and searching

New discussions or updates are highlighted in blue, letting you see what's new since you last looked at the page. If you've already seen everything interested in a review or an update, the box will be collapsed by default, letting you focus on what's most important.

Want to share part of a discussion in chat or in an e-mail? You can easily link to reviews, review request updates, and individual comments through the link icon on the side.

Finding review requests has gotten easier with new support for Elasticsearch and on-the-fly search indexing, ensuring that any new changes made to review requests can instantly be found. (Note that Elasticsearch 2.x is currently required.)

New extension capabilities

Working with the API or extensions? Integrating with your own in-house tools? We have some new toys to play with:

Review Board now works as an OAuth2 Provider, letting your users easily connect your service to their account in a safe way

Custom avatar backends for using your company's existing photo database instead of Gravatar.com.

New fine-grained control for modifying extra_data in the API, and controlling access to data.

A better way of adding customs fields, with built-in options for drop-downs, checkboxes, date fields, and more.

Did we mention it's a big release?

Whew, that's a lot, and doesn't even cover all the new features in the release.

Ready to get going with Review Board 3.0? We recommend installing on a test server first with a copy of your database, just to make sure it works for you.

Please let us know how Review Board 3.0 works for you, or what you're most excited about. You can also find us on Reddit at /r/reviewboard.