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.

A slick highlight video from the Jenkins User Conference, 2011 was posted recently which captures some great quotes from a number of the fantastic speakers who participated in the inaugural JUC.

I've embedded the video below, enjoy!

Shortly after the Jenkins project shows up at SCALE10x we will also be at FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels on February 4th and 5th.

If you can make it to Brussels, you definitely should come to FOSDEM. It's one of the largest meetings of open source developers and users on the planet! It's a tremendous opportunity to meet other people in the open source community but also a great learning experience, with over 25 main tracks and plenty of devrooms each hosting their own talks, demos and hackathons. The event is also free!

This year Jenkins will host a stand (table) in the exhibit hall where we will have Jenkins stickers, flyers and maybe even some t-shirts! In addition to the stand, R Tyler Croy will be speaking in the Configuration and Systems Management dev room on the subject of "Open Source Infrastructure - Running the Jenkins project with Puppet and more."

If you're interested in joining in, there's some organizational material on the FOSDEM page on the wiki, with some planning/discussion happening on this mailing list.

I hope to see you there!

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.