On February 2nd, 2011 the first release of Jenkins, version 1.396, was made available for public consumption. Thus marking a new beginning for many of us who had come to rely on this very versatile piece of software and wanted to see it continue to thrive.

Along with some other bug fixes, the 1.396 release of Jenkins included a very important changelog item:

Fixed a trademark bug that caused a considerable fiasco by renaming to Jenkins

On behalf of the core Jenkins team and the governance board I would like to extend a extremely large Thank You! to all of the plugin developers, bug filers, wiki page editors, book authors and the users who have helped grow Jenkins into the project it is today.

Some of the tidbits from our highlight reel:

• As of this writing there have been 54 releases of Jenkins
• Jenkins now supports writing plugins in Ruby as well as Java (more languages in the process)
• We have 7 high-speed mirrors streaming Jenkins packages to users around the world.
• There are now over 450 different plugins available for Jenkins
• Over 80 donors participated in our end of year fundraising drive
• 5 "Long Term Support" releases have been published by the Jenkins community, offering users a slower moving upgrade target (supported even further by CloudBees' Enterprise Jenkins product)
• Public project governance meetings are held and recorded (almost) every couple of weeks.
• More than 340 individuals contribute on GitHub to the project in some form or another.
• About 750 members of the developers mailing list and around 1700 on the users mailing list

There are many other impressive sounding numbers I could rattle off, but the list is far too long to be interesting.

The project isn't perfect and nor is the software, but we're off to a fine start and I hope you'll join us in making this next year of Jenkins even better than the first.

I've tweaked the website so that downloading the Windows and Mac installers will navigate the browser to "thank you/what's next" page. These pages have links to Wiki that educate the users on where/how the installer will run Jenkins.

Hopefully this makes it little easier for new users to get started on Jenkins. I've tested the new mechanism with IE, Safari, and Firefox, but if you notice a problem, please let us know.

Until now, Jenkins plugins written in Java or Groovy could only be built with Maven, using the maven-hpi-plugin to generate a proper manifest and archive which Jenkins can consume. But starting now, you can also use Gradle!

See the wiki for information on how you can use Gradle and the new gradle-jpi-plugin to build, test and release your Java or Groovy Jenkins plugin.

Jenkins community survey result is in, which shows a number of interesting stats for us developers, such as 82% of people saying their Jenkins is mission critical, or the spread of distributed builds, especially compared to my earlier similar usage analytics.

But just as interesting is the free-form answers to questions like "If there was anything you could you change about Jenkins CI, what would it be?", and while the answer is colorful, there are a few common themes that one can easily spot.

One of them is "nothing!", which made me feel good, but another is "UI improvement." And incidentally, Domi has started a thread in the Jenkins-users list about this exact topic a week ago.

The idea is to brainstorm what kind of concrete improvements people would like to see, then run them through some real user experience designers and decide which ones are good ideas and which one

In 1.430, we added the translation assistance plugin in the hope of increasing the contribution from the community. It's been 3 months, and I've finally took the opportunity to integrate them into Jenkins.

The result is pretty amazing. Before this, we had 26 languages, with wildly varying degree of completeness, such as French, Japanese, German, etc. This is still pretty good, but this integration added updates to 40 languages, including 17 brand-new languages, pushing the total up to whopping 43 languages. Among the newly added languages are Arabic (sorry, no right-to-left support yet), Esperanto, Hebrew, as well as large amount of Chinese (both simplified and traditional) and Korean.

While working with this, I've also discovered an issue that prevented Jenkins from correctly showing Hebrew, Indonesian, and Yedish localizations. All these changes will be in 1.443. And going forward, I'll be integrating changes more frequently to reduce the delay.