João Prado Maia’s Weblog

So the last few months were pretty busy at work, and I had not much free time to handle Eventum patches/contributions from the community, so I’ll be catching up for the next few days and make sure we are going through the process of merging those changes into the next release of Eventum.

The community as a whole seems to be growing at every release we do, and we will try to release more often in the future. The next 1.5 release of Eventum should have some pretty nice features, like per-project permissions and etc that Bryan was working on.

Since I last posted something here (looks like this blog business is not for me) a lot of stuff happened in my life:

– I left my job on Lexicon Genetics and joined MySQL AB
– MySQL AB acquired all rights to Eventum, and we will release an open-source version of it in six months
– Some redneck driver hit my car and lied his ass off saying it was somehow my fault
– Got my car fixed (they paid for the repairs)
– Moved to another apartment so I could get a separate home office
– Continued developing new features to Eventum

And now we will finally start using Eventum (still in beta) for our support customers.

I have been working hard lately on Eventum, and a bunch of new exciting features:

– Ability to allow visitors to signup for new accounts, and have these new accounts restricted to customizable set of available projects. The administrator also has the ability to specify which permission level these users should be granted

– A new ‘reporter’ permission level that allows users to all of the same privileges as a ‘viewer’ user, but with the added ability to report new issues, handle support emails and to enter their time in the time tracking module

– RSS feeds for custom filters. The user basically just needs to go to the Advanced Search screen, create a custom filter and then an RSS feed will be available. The problem is that this requires HTTP-Auth support on the RSS reader, but there are available tools out there.

– An installation tool that helps the administrator as much as possible on how to setup the application, including automatically creating the necessary MySQL tables, setting up the permissions and so on

– The handling of duplicate issues is also much better, with the ability to mark several issues as duplicates of an existing one, and from then on all changes to the ‘master’ issue will be propagated to the ‘child’ ones

– The administrator/manager of the tool can create canned email responses and use them while replying to support emails. This will help minimize common tasks a lot

– Ability to save and load draft email responses, so a reply to a support email could be created by several users collaborating together

This is getting pretty good… I’m almost in the level where I’m ready to release version 1.0.

So the support for custom field is pretty much finished, at least for this first version of the system. Custom fields can be created and assigned at a project level, and the fields show up in the ‘Report an Issue’ screen, as well as the anonymous post form. Users can also update the values of the custom fields.

I worked on the software a little more, and added a couple of features that will make the system easier to use. Now when an user is assigned to only one project, the login process will not ask the user to select a project – it only makes sense, right ?

I also finally had the patiente to go over the CVS integration script and fix it up so that it works with a variety of ways:

cvs -q commit -m “Message here (issue: 24)” file.ext
cvs -q commit -m “Message here (issue #24,#56)” file.ext
cvs -q commit -m “Message here (bug: 24)” file.ext
cvs -q commit -m “Message here (bug: #24,56)” file.ext

The commands above will notify Eventum and it will archive these changes as associated with the appropriate issues/bugs.

Pretty productive weekend, come to think of it.

Phillip Smith from the Window Maker project made me agree on developing custom fields in the first version of Eventum. I knew that custom fields were a common requirement from customers of bug tracking systems, but I also always thought they would be pretty difficult to implement.

It ended up that it was pretty easy to add that feature. The support right now is pretty simple, but you can basically create custom fields at a project level. That is, you can create a custom field named ‘Operating System’ for project ‘Application XYZ’ and another custom field named ‘Version’ for project ‘Application ABC’.

After this feature is completely tested and committed, I’ll go back to work in the reporting section of the system.