ANN: Browsershots 0.4-beta2

[Johann C. Rocholl]

The second beta version of Browsershots 0.4 has been released under
the GNU GPL (Version 3) today. Browsershots is a distributed system
for automatically making screenshots of web content in different
browsers. Both the server and the screenshot factory software are
written in Python.

Project Status:
Version 0.4 is a full rewrite of Browsershots, based on the Django
framework. It is still not feature complete, but already quite usable.
The public demo at browsershots.org is running the latest trunk code
with more than 5,000 visits (50,000 pageviews) per day.

Version 0.3 has been retired after the release of 0.3.0 which was
announced here:
http://trac.browsershots.org/wiki/BlogRelease030

Highlights of this release:
The source code was updated to work with the latest Django. Several
language translations were added. The biggest new features are
self-registration for new users and standalone mode for the screenshot
factory.

Summary of changes since 0.4-alpha1:
* Improved documentation.
* Updated to latest Django.
* Added several languages and improved existing translations.
* Less output for ShotFactory if not running --verbose.
* [2027] Display ads on the site, if configured in settings.py.
* [2030] Fixed queue estimates (added missing platform clause).
* [2075] Use RequestContext everywhere.
* [2088] Self-registration for new users, with email verification.
* [2120] Show heavy users at /status/usage/ (login required).
* [2130] Show volunteers with 4800 or more uploads per day on the front page.
* [2156] Don't save page content in the website table.
* [2158] Show server status overview at /status/ (login required).
* [2165] Added browser and OS icons (collected by Marcin Król).
* [2178] Script to delete old screenshots until we have sufficient
         free disk space.
* [2179] Added long options for the command line,
         see shotfactory.py --help for a complete list.
* [2197] Let factory admins add and remove screen sizes and color depths.
* Added ShotFactoryStandalone features for operation without a ShotServer.
* [2203] More helpful error page for unknown URLs.
* [2214] Improved delete_if_exists() to allow shell wildcards.
* [2243] Added reset_browser() for all browsers.
* [2245] Added scroll_bottom() for all browsers.

Release announcements:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/browsershots/
http://trac.browsershots.org/wiki/BlogRelease04beta2
http://trac.browsershots.org/milestone/0.4-beta2

Source code:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=202792
http://trac.browsershots.org/browser/tags/0.4-beta2/
http://svn.browsershots.org/tags/0.4-beta2/

Timeline (history) and roadmap (future):
http://trac.browsershots.org/timeline
http://trac.browsershots.org/roadmap

Synopsis:
Browsershots is a distributed system for automatically making
screenshots of web content in different browsers. Its goal is to make
it easier to test the compatibility of Web pages with a variety of
browsers. The system distributes the work among home computers that
are run by volunteers.

Cheers,
Johann