At the time of writing, Redmine 7.0.0 is just before its release. It is a major release. The various changes include both technical updates and numerous adjustments to the interface. In this post, we summarise a few of the (in our opinion) most important new features.
As always, you can find the full changelog on Redmine.org.
Note: Our plugins up to and including version 4.5.0 do not yet support Redmine 7.0.0. Support for Redmine 7 is expected from plugin version 4.6.0 onwards. As usual, you should always check the minimum requirements first before updating.
Features that make your daily work easier
- Reworked header: The page header gets a new navigation bar (Feature #43937).
- Updated design: With Open Color, the colours are unified. This comes with adjusted spacing and clearer borders throughout the interface (Feature #43256).
- File type icons: Attachments now show matching file icons instead of the previous paperclip (Feature #43797).
- Insert tables from spreadsheets: Content from Excel or LibreOffice Calc can be pasted directly into text fields as a CommonMark or Textile table (Feature #43950).
- Preview for PDF and Office files: Attachments can be displayed without downloading them first (Feature #22483, #8959).
- Export wiki as ZIP: All wiki pages of a project can be downloaded together as a ZIP archive (Feature #43978).
Note: Open Color is mainly of interest to theme developers. Because the colours are maintained centrally as CSS variables, a custom colour scheme can be adjusted in one place instead of overriding individual values all over the CSS. At the same time, this creates the technical basis for a later dark mode, which would then essentially only need a second set of variable values.
Relevant settings for project managers and administrators
The following changes concern the control behind the scenes rather than the daily ticket work. They are therefore more relevant for administrators and project managers, because they help to keep responsibilities and processes clearly separated and access traceable.
- Watch assignee automatically: Anyone who is assigned a task can optionally be added as a watcher automatically (Feature #2716).
- Sorting of the assignee selection: The order in the assign dropdown is configurable, including grouping by groups (Feature #43996, #44015).
- Track usage of API and Atom keys: The last use of access keys is logged (Feature #43938).
A few technical changes
- Update to Rails 8 (Feature #43205) and support for Ruby 4.0 (Feature #43650).
- Webhooks: Redmine can now trigger webhooks and automatically notify external systems on events (Feature #29664).
- Changed HTML processing: Text processing switches from html-pipeline to Loofah (Feature #42737, #43643).
Performance and usability
- Faster rendering when mentioning users (@login) on large instances (Defect #43838).
- Better performance when saving workflows (Feature #43957).
Conclusion
A technical major upgrade is not a feature you “use” - it is more the prerequisite for everything else to keep running securely and in the long term. Bottom line, Redmine 7.0.0 brings two things together: many small improvements for more pleasant work, and with Rails 8, Ruby 4.0 and webhooks a noticeable technical step compared to the previous series (Redmine 6.x).
Note for hosting customers: For customers using Redmine Managed Application Hosting, we take care of the update. We test new versions such as Redmine 7.0.0 in advance, in particular for compatibility with all the plugins in use, and only make them available afterwards. No technical work on your part is required. We will adapt our plugins to the new version quickly, but we also have to make sure that any third-party plugins already work with it. As soon as that is the case, there is nothing to stop an update to version 7.