Profile Picture Thumbnails, Following Projects, and Fork Collaboration

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We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website last week.

Profile Picture Thumbnails

We have added a way to select a thumbnail from your profile picture, which will start appearing next to usernames across the site.  Managing your thumbnail is simple. From your profile page, choose Edit your profile.  On the left side, you’ll find an intuitive widget for choosing a profile picture, uploading it, and editing your thumbnail image.

If you previously uploaded a profile picture, we’ve used that to generate a starter thumbnail. We welcome your suggestions and ideas for areas where seeing user thumbnails would be useful or interesting.

Following Projects

Based on some feedback we’ve received recently, we have taken several steps to help you discover and follow interesting and popular projects on CodePlex:

• The homepage now surfaces the top Projects Users are Following from the previous 7 days.
• When you visit any project homepage, you can see at a glance how many people follow the project.
• When you visit the People tab for any project, you will see both the project contributors and the 25 most recent project followers.

Fork Collaboration

We now support enabling collaborators on a fork based on a large number of user requests. 

From the Source Code management page for your fork, you will now see the following on the right side:

To add a collaborator, type in a username and click Add. All fork collaborators will have the ability to push to the fork and send/cancel pull requests.  To remove a collaborator, hover over user, and click on the X that appears:

The CodePlex team values your feedback, and is frequently monitoring Twitter, our Discussions and Issue Tracker for new features or problems. If you’ve not visited the Issue Tracker recently, please take a few moments to log an idea or vote for the features you would most like to see implemented on CodePlex.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 13, 2010
  Why not just support Gravatar for the profile pictures?

• Anonymous
  December 21, 2010
  While fork collaboration is a great enhancement, I'm not sure if profile picture thumbnails is a great use of your time. Why not just support Gravatars and move on to other features developers really care about?

• Anonymous
  December 22, 2010
  Because that requires much more functionality. By using the profile picture (that they already have a way of you uploading) it should end up being less work.