Since the end of April, Jenkins has been officially part of the SPI (Software in the Public Interest), an umbrella organization which offers a useful level of legal status for the project.

Up until recently we had not taken proper advantage of this new legal umbrella, thankfully that's changed as we're now capable of accepting donations!

For the project this is a big step forward as it will allow us to offset the cost of servers for the project, bandwidth, SSL certificates and other costs incurred as part of running such a large open source project.

Trivia: The machine that this page is being served from originally started out as "hudson labs", purchased and colocated by abayer, kohsuke and myself.

Since we're now able to accept donations, we're kicking off a donation drive to help recover some of the costs incurred this summer (which I've discussed previously). Our immediate goal is to raise $5130 to recoup bandwidth costs, if you can spare some change, head on over to the SPI online donation page and help us out :)

We just posted the updated Long-term Release (LTS) of 1.409.2.

Just as a recap, with LTS releases, we plan on providing a release train that only has backported changes. 1.409.2 contains a handful of important bug fixes since 1.409.1. For more about LTS, see this wiki page.

Thanks to the heroic effort of those who are involved, namely Vojtech Juranek and a bunch of heroes, this release went through a rather rigorous testing, including all the automated tests we have plus a considerable number of manual eye-ball tests.

To download, click the "Long-Term Support Release" tab from the top page. If you've already been using LTS, you should start receiving update notifications soon.

A couple of months ago Jenkins embarked on an new project, the Jenkins "LTS" (Long Term Support) release line. A LTS branch of development is common in most major open source projects, especially those with substantial corporate adoption, so this was a great step for the project as a whole.

We're now coming up on the second LTS release, which will be an incremental update to the previous one (1.409.1) with only the most important fixes back-ported to the branch.

Now is when we need your help.

We need testers and interested parties from the community to help verify the stability of the planned LTS update, 1.409.2, which is now in the release candidate stages.

The testing of 1.409.2 has been spearheaded by community member vjuranek who has created this fantastic test matrix to help coordinate testing of release candidates.

The LTS project is entirely community driven, so your input is invaluable in making these releases successful.

If you're interested in helping, speak up on the -dev mailing list and start pitching in on the test matrix!

As we announced yesterday, we are organizing a Jenkins User Conference, and we are delighted to announce its Call for Papers is now open. We are looking forward to receiving amazing proposals from infrastructure experts to novice developers in the Jenkins community. Use your creativity. Share and showcase your unique approach to utilizing Jenkins technology.

We do not encourage overt marketing pitches. We encourage breakout sessions, work shops, good case studies with transferable, tangible lessons and other topics like:

• plug-in development
• Specific Jenkins applications that solve testing/building problems in particular areas: mobility, enterprise/web/cloud applications, and UI testing
• Beyond Java (i.e Jenkins w/ PHP, Ruby, etc)
• Jenkins best practices, lessons learned, case studies, tips and tricks
• Lightning Talks (10 min)

IMPORTANT: Submit your proposal as soon as possible to CFP alias. Call for Papers closes Sept 1, 2011.

Sessions are 50 min long. In your proposal pls include the following info:

• Name
• Job Title
• Email
• twiter id
• Company/website
• Paper Title
• Audience Level (General, Beginner, Intermediate, Advance)
• Paper Abstract
• Your bio

We've done meetups, we've done sessions, we've done workshops, now it's about time we went ahead and did user conference don't you think?

Our pals over at CloudBees (Harpeet specifically) have taken the initiative in starting to organize just that: a Jenkins User Conference on October 2nd.

If you have your calendar at the ready, you'll notice that October 2nd is the Sunday before JavaOne kicks off this year in San Francisco.

The details are still coming together, but a proposed agenda has already been posted by Harpeet.

As this is a community event, I'll be sure to keep the updates coming on this site but you may want to add the CloudBees' Blog to your feed reader just in case (or just follow them on Twitter: @CloudBees).