New version of devtools: 0.8

We’re pleased to announce a new version of devtools, the package that makes R package development easy. The main features in this version are:

• A complete rewrite of the code loading system which simulates namespace loading much more accurately – this means using load_all is much closer to installing and loading the package. It also compiles and loads C, C++ and Fortran code in the src/ directory.
• All devtools command now only take a path to a package and default to using the working directory if no path is supplied.
• All R commands are run in --vanilla mode and print the console command that’s run.
• Install github now allows you to install from pull request and private repositories.

Plus much, much more – for a complete list of changes, see the NEWS on github. If you’re interested in package development with devtools you may also want to join the rdevtools mailing list.

ggplot2 0.9.2 has been released!

The main changes in this version are to the theming system. There are also a number of enhancements to the theming system that make it easier to modify themes and we’ve renamed a number of functions to have more informative names. Your existing code should continue to work, although you may receive warnings about functions that have been deprecated. Replacing them with new versions is easy. Here are the changes you are likely to encounter:

• opts() is deprecated. You can simply replace it with theme() in your code.
• theme_blank(), theme_text(), theme_rect(), theme_line(), and theme_segment() are deprecated. You can replace them with element_blank(), element_text(), element_rect(), and element_line().
• Previously, the way to set the title of a plot was opts(title="Title text"). In the new version, use ggtitle("Title text") or labs(title="Title text").

Other improvements include the addition of stat_ecdf, defaulting to the colour bar legend for continuous colour scales, nicer default breaks, better documentation and much more (including many bug fixes). You can read the complete list of changes on the development site