PETERBE.COM

Today I finally got around to launching a new version of the IssueTrackerProduct. After a years worth of bug fixes and new features added the most exciting one to me is the Monthly summary feature.

Gosh! I really regret I've never properly collected email addresses for people who actually use the IssueTrackerProduct. I was using a SourceForge mailing list for a while but that got to spam ridden I gave up on it a long time ago.

Check out how long the list of change is on version 0.11

Feedback mucho appreciatado.

IssueTrackerMassContainer is a simple Zope product that is used to put a bunch of IssueTrackerProduct instances into. It doesn't add much apart from a nice looking dashboard that lists all recent issues and then with an AJAX poll it keeps updating automatically.

But what it was doing was it recursively put together all issues across all issue trackers, sorting them and then returning only the first 20. Fine, but once the numbers start to add up it can become a vast sort operation to deal with.

In my local development copy of 814 issues, by the use of pympler and time() I was able to go from 7 Mb taking 2 seconds down to using only 8 Kb and taking 0.05 seconds.

The Custom Fields feature started as a consultancy job in which we agreed the work can be open sourced as part of IssueTrackerProduct so I never got around to write an sensible high level documentation for it. Now I have! From the news piece about it:

"Custom Fields was a feature that was released almost a year ago but didn't have much documentation. Especially easy documentation that describes what it is and how it can be used. That has changed now.

In Custom Fields it is now described what they are and how they can become useful to you. It's such a powerful tool that very few "competing" issue/bug tracking systems can offer."

The written documentation is here: Custom Fields

Feedback appreciated.

A new (development) version of the IssueTrackerProduct has just been released. It contains some crucial bug fixes (to some people) that I really couldn't delay much more.

Sadly I never really had the time to fully implement the TinyMCE support. It's going to come in the next release. It actually works already but you need to know which buttons to press since there is no simple one button to press for it to work.

I just got back from the Helpdesk & IT Support Show in Olympia (Kensington, London). My main impression is: there are many, big players in this industry.

My pet project, the IssueTrackerProduct is very basic in comparison to some of these companies products. Although it's often used in help desk situations the kind of help desk solutions I've seen today are way different. For many of them, it's all about integrating various systems such as asset management, call logging, configuration management, knowledge management, etc. It seems that the actual help desk apps seems to have to be low priority compared to getting all pieces to fit together.

The IssueTrackerProduct was on tuesday this week featured on Ajaxian.com which is a really good looking site that focuses on nice usage of AJAX in websites.

They could have chosen a better screenshot I guess but other than that I'm quite happy to be included.