In October of this year, RT turned 20 years old, at least if you look at the commit for the official 1.0 release and the date of the 1.0 tarball on our download site. If you look all the way back to the beginning, you'll see RT is actually two years older than that, and even older if you look at dates in some of the notes in the initial commit.
Whichever day you want to pick to celebrate RT's birthday, we're proud to still be going strong after 20+ years and 700 releases of RT. And believe it or not, there are people out there still running RT 1!
RT 5 in 2020
As we prepare for another decade of RT, we're very excited to announce that RT 5, the next major version of RT, will be released in 2020. One of the biggest changes to RT is a complete update of the web front-end. We re-wrote the web interface in Bootstrap, one of the most popular and widely used front-end component libraries on the web today.
For many users, this means a modern new theme and a responsive design. For developers familiar with Bootstrap, it means it will now be much easier to customize RT's UI or even create your own new themes using the Bootstrap toolkit as a base.
Bootstrap-based RT 5 home page
We have also integrated Fontawesome and added sharp, clean, SVG icons throughout the user interface.
The front-end rewrite isn't all we have been working on. RT 5 will have a ton of new features to make RT easier and more efficient than ever. As a short preview, here are a few of the features we're working on:
A new Javascript charting engine using Chart.js
New chart engine
RT configuration accessible from the web administrative interface
SuperUsers will now be able to take advantage of RT's hundreds of configuration options by making changes right in the browser, no ssh required.
Configuration in RT admin interface
Transaction Query Builder
You can now search for individual transactions and get transaction information in search results. This allows you to do searches like "show me all the replies I sent this week" or "show me all of the changes to this custom field on this ticket" or even "show me how many replies were sent by everyone on the Support queue last week".
Transaction query builder
Watch Us Work and Work with US
As an open source company, we develop in the open, so if you're interested in experimenting along with us, the future release is on the RT master branch, accessible on GitHub. If you have feedback, feature requests, or bug reports, you’ll see the new RT 5 version as an option in our public RT system. You can sign in with a Google account or post as a guest. Note that we can’t notify you of updates on guest posts. Coming soon, we'll have a demo site with the pre-release code so you can see it without building your own.
We're very excited about this new release and we think you will be too. We'll have more information in the new year and possibly some pre-releases that will allow us to get some testing out in the field. Happy (a bit late) birthday to RT and happy (a bit early) new year!