With Gerrit 2.16 comes the Wikimedia Foundation biggest Gerrit upgrade! Gerrit has improved in every shape and form since 2.15 from a redesigned layout (code wise) to new features being able to do more from the UI!

Backend

Since the beginning, Gerrit 2.x has always used a Database. As we progress into the future upstream thought of ways to improve the backend. The improvement is in the form of NoteDB. NoteDB is essentially a DB in a git repo. With this, it makes it easier to account for changes, easier to backup and consistency. NoteDB first occurred in 2.14 as a experimental Database. NoteDB started being recommended from 2.15+. The Wikimedia Foundation migrated to NoteDB in June 2018. Since then things have improved simnifically from being able to post emojis to being able to backup properly without the risk of losing something. Now with the upgrade to 2.16, it is groups turn to be migrated to NoteDB. With this migration we will finally drop the Database and move the final table into a H2 database. This will improve uptime significantly as we won't be depending on a database availability anymore! Gerrit 3.0 has dropped support for Databases already!

User interface

Gerrit's UI has always been focused on developers and never on both developers and the user experience. This all changed with Gerrit 2.14 when a new UI called PolyGerrit was developed. The UI was experimental at the time, but grew quickly in popularity. The UI was redesigned in 2.15 with many many improvements. The UI was eventually marked as stable and supported from 2.15+. The UI continued to be redesigned with even more features being supported from 2.16+. 2.16 marked the deprecation of the OLD UI (GWTUI), it also marked PolyGerrit as the default UI!

Inline Editor

This is very much a big request from our users. So users will be glad that Inline editor is now available! Not only is Inline editor available but it is so much better then GWTUI version! It has better support for Mobile Devices but also saves your edits automatically to your local storage (browser storage) so you don't loose your edit's if something unexpected happened. We can also customise the editor experience now, PolyGerrit does not have a built in enhancement editor rather it was made into a new plugin called codemirror-editor.

Dashboard /New User Experence

PolyGerrit takes the user experience to a whole new level. It updates the dashboard to show how users can get started using the new work flow. The change screen will have a "UPDATE CHANGE" button that tells the user how to update their own changes.

The dashboard has also been redesigned with a modern look

Project Dashboards

This is also a very big request amongst users. This feature was holding back some users from using PolyGerrit. So these users will be glad to know that this is now supported!

Change Screen

The change screen get's a new layout with a whole range of improvements from status badges to your code reviewer label getting a new look. The update also includes support for plugin's now! So see Plugins on how we will using this new functionality for WMF Gerrit.

Another new feature is comment thread where you can find every single comment left inline! This will make it easier to spot if you didn't address all feedback/unresolved comments.

Plugins

PolyGerrit fully supports plugins now! Allowing you to take the whole UI to the future! The Wikimedia Foundation plans to install image-diff, zuul-status and our very own wikimedia plugin!

image-diff

This plugin allows you to diff a image so you know exactly what's change. This will benefit operations/mediawiki-config the most.
This plugin is revolutionary as it brings image diffing experience to Gerrit!

zuul-status

This plugin was developed by paladox in response to this task T214068. This plugin integrates zuul into gerrit's ui making the experience even more interesting!

wikimedia

We removed this plugin last year as it was experimental since then we have added modules for PolyGerrit's UI! We have improved the developer experence by introducing a "recheck" button so you only need to press it and watch the zuul-status plugin fetch the information to display the progress.

Future of Gerrit!

Gerrit is about to have a major release with 3.0. Gerrit 3.0 will drop the OLD UI (referred to as GWTUI), it will also drop Database support.