I’ve recently started upgrading my projects to SourceForge’s new “forge” software Allura. Upgrading existing projects has been available for quite some time (IIRC since July), but I thought I didn’t have time to deal with it until now. From my short experience with the “new” SourceForge, I came away with two short insights.
The first: upgrading is a breeze. The SourceForge people did a wonderful job, and upgrading is fast and easy. No tinkering is required except updating repository URLs. This surprised me, as I still remember the days when registering a new project on SourceForge was a lengthy process, so I thought upgrading would be the same as well. I happily found out I was wrong. I also heard that project registration is quick nowadays. Your project is up immediately, and they only approve it afterwards.
The new project management software gives SourceForge its much-needed update. A new code-browsing design and ticketing systems are among the things that were updated. They even have some nice little features, like syndicating a feed as your project news on the project’s page.
Overall, everything looks pretty nice, and it seems that finally SourceForge is trying to stay competitive on the edge of GitHub. Despite the notorious user interface SourceForge had, I always kind of liked it, as it was there before others, and it was one of the places that got me started using and later developing open source programs. I really hope they keep up the good work and continue to improve it.