Today we are very proud to announce the release of Collabtive 1.0!
Collabtive 1.0 marks the culmination of 5 years of development.

With more than 60 improvements, it is our biggest and best release ever.

With Collabtive 1.0 we have fixed all known bugs, overhauled the database access layer and added lots of new features.

Overhauled database access
In a major under-the-hood change we have ported the database access to PDO (PHP Data Objects).
While desireable for a while, this became really necessary now because the old way of accessing the database will be deprecated in the next version of PHP and removed in a future version.

Using PDO brings security and performance advantages over the old way.
It will also enable us to support more databases than just MySQL in the future relatively easy. In fact work on supporting SQLite for 1.1 has already begun.

Using PDO will, unfortunately, also break plugin compatibility for plugins sold for earlier versions.
All plugins need to be updated to work with this new database access method (more on updating plugins below).

Improved reporting
The PDF exports for all reports have been re-written from the ground up.
This rewrite provides much better performance, especially when exporting large reports. It also generates much smaller PDF files and is more extensible.
It provides better font stretching and the organisation of the fields in the reports has been optimized, making them more visually pleasing.

An additional PDF report has been added to the desktop: The “My tasks” block can now be exported to PDF.

Additionally we have replaced the Excel export with a much more robust CSV export.
The Excel export functionality was based on an outdated library and not fully compatible with newer versions of Microsoft and Libre Office.
The CSV export, by contrast, is very robust and relies on internal PHP functionality. It allows the exported data to be imported in a wide variety of programs, including office suites.

View permission
The newly implemented “view” permission allows you to define which modules are available in a “project” on a per role basis.
This feature allows you, for example, to hide the timetracker and messages section from clients (”client” role), but enable them for users and admins.

When updating from an earlier version of Collabtive, all existing roles will have the “view” permission enabled for all modules.
This is done to ensure backwards compatibility. You should review your roles if you want to use the view permission on existing roles.

Automatic update notification
With this release Collabtive will check periodically for new releases.
If a new release is available the administrator user(s) will be notified of this on login.

Multibyte-safe strings
Collabtive 1.0 finally introduces fully multibyte capable string handling. This improves the support for non-latin character sets considerably.

Improved localisation
Translations for Hebrew, Norwegian (Nynorsk) and Taiwanese have been added to this release.
Many other translations have been improved. We thank our localisation contributors for this.

Updating plugins
As mentioned earlier, all plugins will have to be updated in order to work with Collabtive 1.0.
For existing users of our plugins, the update will be available at a 50% discount off the normal price.
All plugins sold for Collabtive 1.0 will be compatible for all releases until Collabtive 2.0 (i.e. 1.1., 1.2, etc).

Updating
Be sure to backup your database before doing an update.
Updating from earlier versions of Collabtive is supported using 6 steps:

1. Unpack the Collabtive archive.
2. Retrieve config.php from your server.
3. Put your config.php in /config/standard/ in the folder where you unpacked the archive, replacing the blank one.
4. Upload everything to your server, replacing any old Collabtive files.
5. Point your browser to update.php.
6. Make sure to renew your login, so the added view permission can be activated.
7. Delete install.php and update.php from your server.

Download
Collabtive 1.0 can be downloaded from the mirrors at our download page:
http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/downloadref.php