March has been a very busy time. Although we weren't able to meet the 1st March deadline, the switch to the HTTP submission process has started. Currently it's still considered Beta, but initial problems appear to have been worked out, and the Metabase is receiving reports thick and fast. So much so that some testers started to ramp up their smoker bots again, forgetting that some were still submitting SMTP reports. You can read David Golden's report of his beta test update.

Last month also saw a switch away from the NNTP ID for reports. This caused a little confusion in places, but is necessary to support the two feeds for reports, before ultimately switching completely to the Metabase, at which point the NNTP ID will no longer be used. As a consequence some of the tools used with the CPAN Testers website may not have appeared to be correct. Currently the IDs used to display reports are specific to the cpanstats database, and no longer match the NNTP ID. The GUID which is used by the Metabase can be used, and this can be generated from a NNTP ID using David Golden's CPAN-Testers-Common-Utils distribution. If you spot any instances where there appears to be a mis-match, please let me know, and I'll investigate.

Which brings us to the next phase of CT2.0 development. Now the Metabase is up and running, the cpanstats database needs to use a feed from it to include the HTTP submitted reports. Tests have performed well and all appears to be working as intended. The next step is to integrate the reports into the live websites. The majority of work has been completed, but unfortunately due to unforeseen personal circumstances, the final integration work has been delayed a little. However, we do expect the Metabase reports to be live within the cpanstats database this month.

Normally at the end of each report I provide counts for the number of testers for the month. Due to the move to CT2.0, this figure would currently show only half of the picture, so we'll be holding off that this month. Hopefully we can provide a better numbers next month.

Keep watching for updates to CT2.0, both here and on David Golden's blog.