The GitHub Blog: New Features

We've upgraded GitHub Pages to support the latest version of Jekyll, the open source static site generator. Whether you're a new user or a savvy veteran, here are a few features that might help make publishing your next site a bit easier:

• Native Sass & CoffeeScript support - Simply commit a .coffee, .sass or .scss file to your site's repository, and GitHub Pages will transparently output JavaScript or CSS when your site is published.

• Kramdown as the default Markdown engine - In addition to better error handling, Kramdown supports MathJax, fenced code blocks, nested lists, tables, and much more.

• Collections - With collections, Jekyll is no longer limited to just posts and pages—it can now publish all kinds of different documents, such as code methods, team members, or your favorite open source projects.

• JSON data - .json files in the _data directory now get read in and are exposed to Liquid templates as the site.data namespace (along with .yml files).

Under the hood there's also some great time savers such as front-matter defaults, the where and group_by filters, and a new starter site. Check out the full list of 300+ changes and new features added to Jekyll since version 1.5.1.

If you use Jekyll locally, simply run gem update github-pages, or follow these instructions to update your local build environment to the latest version.

Happy publishing!

We've rebuilt GitHub Issues to be smarter: search smarter, filter smarter, and manage your issues and pull requests smarter.

If you want to see it in action, check out Bootstrap's issues. To learn more, read on.

Search and filter

A big part of managing your issues and pull requests is focusing on what needs to happen next. The new search box at the top of the page gets you there faster:

You can filter your search results by author, label, milestone, and open/close state. You can also use any of our advanced search terms to find just what you're after.

Watch an issue evolve

Over time, titles change, labels and milestones get closer to completion, and issues get new owners. Now you have better insight into these changes.

Pull requests also make use of our new Deployments API, which lets you know exactly when a pull request has made it to your testing, staging, and production environments:

The new labels & milestones pages

Labels and milestones can help with managing a project's issues, but it's also important to make sure you can manage the labels and milestones themselves. Two new pages offer a better vantage point into the overall health of your project:

The new labels page (example):

...and an updated milestones page (example):

All the small things

There's a slew of smaller changes that went into this release of Issues as well:

• You'll get a notification if an issue is assigned to you.
• No more mixing: the "issues" tab will only show you issues, and the pull requests tab will still only show pull requests. Want to see them together again? Just remove the is:issue or is:pr filter from your search query.
• If you use Task Lists, we'll show the overall progress on that issue or pull request on the listing page:
• You can add labels and assign pull requests to milestones even if you have issues disabled on your repository.
• New keyboard shortcuts mean it's quick to filter down to what you want. Type ? on an issues listing to get a list of the available keyboard shortcuts.
• You can now triage multiple pull requests at once by selecting them and changing their label, assignment, state, or milestone, just like issues.

Learn more about Issues

Check out our updated guide on Mastering Issues to learn more about workflows and how to make issues work for you. And, of course, we've updated our help documentation for the new GitHub Issues, so if you run into any problems, be sure to give them a peek.

A better Issues

Software is about getting things done: either by doing the work, or planning out how to do the work. We hope the new GitHub Issues gets you there quicker and happier.

After we shipped the ability to view GeoJSON & TopoJSON, users have put tons of cool maps on GitHub, but sometimes you still need to see the underlying GeoJSON. Now you can! Map files can now be toggled between their source code and their map rendered representation.

Following the recent release of GitHub for Windows 2.0, we’ve been working hard to bring our two desktop apps closer together.

We’ve just shipped a significant new update to GitHub for Mac, with simplified navigation and a renewed focus on your cloned repositories.

With this update, you’ll be able to spend less time navigating lists of respositories, and more time focusing on your repositories and your branches.

Simplified Navigation

The sidebar now features all your repositories grouped by their origin, and the new toolbar lets you create, clone, and publish additional repositories quickly. You can also press ⇧⌘O to filter local repositories from those associated with GitHub or GitHub Enterprise, and switch between them.

Cloning repositories from GitHub

Fewer steps are required to clone repositories from GitHub Enterprise or GitHub.com. You can now press ⌃⌘O, type the repository name, and then press Enter to clone the repositories you want and need.

Switching and creating new branches

The branch popover (⌘B) has moved to the new toolbar, and now has a “Recent Branches” section that provides a convenient way to switch between all of your in-progress branches.

Branch creation (⇧⌘N) has moved to its own popover, and you can now create a new branch from any existing branch.

How do I get it?

GitHub for Mac will automatically update itself to the latest version. To update right away, open the “GitHub” menu, then “Check For Updates…”, or visit mac.github.com to download the latest release.

NOTE: This release and future releases of GitHub for Mac require OS X 10.8 or later. If you are still running OS X 10.7, you will not be updated to this release.

Feedback

We’d love to hear what you think about this release. If you have any comments, questions or straight-up bug reports, please get in touch.

GitHub is now accepting PayPal, in addition to credit cards, to pay for personal plans and organization accounts.

We've been working closely with Braintree to deliver PayPal payments using their brand new APIs and we're pretty excited with the result. You can use PayPal whether you're just signing up, looking to upgrade, or want to switch off credit card payments.

Paying for GitHub with PayPal has never been easier or looked better, and we're hoping that no matter where you are in the world, you'll be able to use GitHub to build something great!

For more information, see "Paying for your GitHub user account" or "Paying for your GitHub organization account" in the GitHub Help.

We've all merged bad pull requests and wanted to roll back the changes without having to rely on Git commands. Starting today, you can easily revert a pull request on GitHub by clicking Revert:

You'll be prompted to create a new pull request with the reverted changes:

More details about reverting pull requests are available in Help.

Branches are an essential part of collaborating using GitHub Flow. They’ve always been cheap and easy to create within a GitHub repository, and today we’re making branch management more straightforward.

At the top of any repository page, click Branches to see an overview of the branches across your project.

You can quickly filter the branches you’ve created, and see which branches are most active. New sections on the page also make it more obvious how you need to take action on the branches in your repository—whether that’s cleaning up stale branches, examining a branch with a failing test, or sending a pull request for the branch you just pushed.

Need more help? See Creating and deleting branches within your repository and Viewing branches in your repository in GitHub Help.

Two years ago we started using Octicons—our icon font—on GitHub. We use them in many of our sites and include them in Atom. Now we are making them available for download to everyone else. Go forth, and octiconify the world.

octicons.github.com

Today, we're shipping a design update to Gist to give it that same look and feel you're used to on GitHub.com.

Updates include:

• Redesigned conversations
• Redesigned revisions view
• Redesigned user profile
• Redesigned navigation to match GitHub.com
• Additional clone/embed options
• And many more!

We hope you enjoy all the great new updates to Gist.

Happy Gisting!

Starting today, you can lock the conversation on an issue or a pull request. If you're a collaborator on a repository, click the lock in the sidebar of an issue page to lock the thread:

This will be reflected in the conversation timeline:

Users who aren't collaborators on the repository won't be able to comment further:

Repository collaborators will still be able to continue the conversation on a locked thread if they'd like.

Remember that, in addition to conversation locking, you can also block or report users to help keep GitHub a safe community for everyone.

We've supported image viewing and diffing for quite some time now, but today we're happy to announce that we're adding PSD files to the images we support for this. Any PSD assets in your repositories will be treated just like images, meaning you can view them inline and use our three image view modes to see what's changed in a commit.

As always, read more about it in our help documentation.

The most organized people know that finishing a task rarely involves just one step. That's why we're excited to announce nested task lists!

For example:

- [ ] Figure out wormholes
  - [ ] Call @arfon
  - [ ] Research ([docs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Time_travel))
  - [ ] Build prototype #15
  - [ ] Test run #43 @world-domination/time-travel
- [ ] ...?
- [ ] Profit!

Now renders as:

Updates work as before: check items on and off to update their completion state.

For more information, see the Writing on GitHub article in the GitHub Help.

Because we love sharing, we use Gist every day to pass snippets of code, writing, notes, and more to each other. One thing we've noticed with all this sharing is that we've all created Public Gists that we meant to make Secret and vice versa.

Starting today, you can change the visibility of your Gists whenever you want. When editing a Gist you'll now notice a new option to toggle the visibility between Public and Secret. The URL for your Gist will never change, just its visibility.

For more information on the differences between Secret and Public Gists, please see this helpful document.

Happy Gisting!

We're excited to share some recent improvements to GitHub Pages, which you may have already noticed rolling out over the past several weeks:

Additional metadata for organization pages

Many large organizations like Adobe, Netflix, and The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau use GitHub Pages to showcase their open source efforts. We've just made it easier to create beautiful pages for you and your projects by exposing additional project and organization metadata to the site.github namespace:

• contributors - A list of your project's contributors, as returned through the contributors API

• public_repositories - A list of your public repositories as returned from the repositories list API

• organization_members - A list of your organization's public members as returned from the organization members API

Each of these new elements expose complete user/repository objects to Jekyll, and can eliminate the need for making client-side API calls when showcasing your open source efforts on GitHub. For more information on displaying metadata within your Jekyll site, see Repository metadata on GitHub Pages.

Sitemaps

We recently open-sourced and white-listed the jekyll-sitemap plugin. By simply adding the plugin to your site's config file, Jekyll will automatically generate a sitemaps.org-compliant sitemap, making it easier for search engines to index your site's content. For more information, see Sitemaps for GitHub Pages.

Better build feedback

You may have already noticed that following some successful builds you may receive a warning email with helpful feedback about CNAME errors, upgrading your Markdown interpreter, or ensuring your custom domain is properly configured.

Additionally, if your page build does fail, we'll provide you with a link to an error-specific help article so that you can get the problem sorted out in no time.

PageBuild events

A few weeks ago we introduced the PageBuild webhook. If you subscribe to the page_build event, we'll ping your application with the result of your site's build following each push. You can use this information to better integrate GitHub Pages with your current development workflow.

Happy documenting!

Ten weeks ago we debuted Atom, the new text editor that's deeply programmable but also easy to use. Starting today, Atom is available for download to everyone–completely free and open source.

Because we spend most of our day in a text editor, the single most important feature we wanted in an editor was extensibility. Atom is built with the same open source technologies used by modern web browsers. At the core of Atom is Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome. With that comes all the power and innovation being developed for the web. But more importantly, extending Atom is as simple as writing JavaScript and CSS, two languages used by millions of developers each day.

We are open sourcing all of Atom under the MIT license. You can read more about these components on the Atom blog. Our dedicated team within GitHub will continue to develop Atom, but we welcome the creativity, support, and enthusiasm of the open source community to help us make it even better. After ten weeks in public beta, the community has already published 800 packages that extend its capabilities. We look forward to many more to come.

Atom is currently pre-1.0 with a number of areas we would like to improve in the next few months. Our focus will be on improving performance, releasing Atom on Linux and Windows, and stabilizing the APIs before we hit version 1.0.

Download Atom now, and get hacking on it today by creating a package or forking the Atom repository. To stay up to date on all things Atom, follow @AtomEditor.