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.

Email replies and AJAX is the highlight of the latest IssueTrackerProduct release.

If you set up your POP3 for email replies you can simply hit reply on the notifications that goes out and continue an issue discussing without leaving the comfort of Outlook/Thunderbird/Gmail/Hotmail.

Another underestimated important feature is the automatically refreshing issue where the content is periodically refreshed (if the content changes) whilst you're on the page so that you know you're always looking at the very latest copy before you take any action.

For the people who've dared to use the CVS, they've probably already seen the new keyboard shortcuts that is inspired by Gmail. It's very addictive to not have to scroll up and down to reach the navigation or to be able to quickly jump to another issue without having to click on List Issue.

And for the Gettings Things Done people you might like how you now can get a list of "You next action issues" on the Home page. This is a clever list that attempts to figure out what you need to do next in that order.

I've finally put together a neat little list of some of the most important features of the IssueTrackerProduct on one page. It's not quite finished yet because I want to expand it with some screenshots embedded as little thumbnails. (hint hint to the community if they want to contribute)

Check it out: www.issuetrackerproduct.com/Documentation/Features

An interesting thing about this page is also the javascript used to enhance it. If you look at the HTML source of the page you'll see that there's no markup for the table of contents, the #top links or the importance voting links. All of those things are added after the page is loaded with some javascript loops. The advantage with this is that the markup (aka. structure) is kept very slim and simple. In actuality, some browsers such as Lynx, Googlebot and IE4 don't need these extra effects. It's nice if they work but the core thing here is the content, the text about the issuetracker features.

The voting links are ajaxy but at the time of writing it don't work in Internet Explorer because I can't attach a decent onclick function to the links when the links are created with document.createElement("a"). Don't matter so much because it still works even if AJAX fails. Please don't click the voting links just to test the AJAX, click to actually vote what's important to you.

A week ago I ran some ad hoc benchmarks on various suspect functions in the IssueTrackerProduct and came to a clear and simple conclusion: searching is the bottleneck and within the search it's the searching for file attachments that take all of the time.

If you're interested and open minded, here's the results of that benchmark This sparked some thoughts. First I wrote a filename splitter which isn't rocket science but I'm proud to say that it's use is brilliant. Before, the find-by-file function in the IssueTrackerProduct used a plain old find() test like this:

 filename.find('foo') > -1

This is very fast but not very intelligent. For example it'll with match on foobar.txt and plainfooter.gif. So, what I did instead was to create a KeywordIndex and index all the splitted filenames in that index.

I think there's a lot of potential in screencasting. As far as I've understood, screencasting is when you make a movie recoding in some manner of what happens on the computer screen. To test this I downloaded Camtasia Studio 3 and as a demo I created a new Issue Tracker instance on www.issuetrackerproduct.com. The next time I do this I'll make sure I plan what I want to do instead of just making it up after I've started. On this windows computer that I tried this it lagged so incredibly much that it was to move the mouse because it didn't move smoothly. Perhaps there are some further options to free up some resources to make it run better.

If you want to see the result (as a Flash movie) follow this link (1.2Mb)

I've released the 0.6.12 version of the IssueTrackerProduct which introduces some new cool interface changes that I'm proud to get feedback on (dream on Peter!)

The latest addion is the gradient backgrounds on the header (orange like colour) and the issue data header (dark grey like colour) which I hope will make the issuetracker look at bit more 2005.

In the Real issuetracker there are still a few Open and Taken issues which haven't made it into this release. That's also why I've chosen to make it a "Development" release to stress me a bit to get started on those remaining issues and then be able to release a stable one in a matter of weeks.

I've made a quick graph showing how the releases of the IssueTrackerProduct increases steadily in size with every new version. Since the first release, 10 months ago, the release package has more than doubled in size. Much of that is due to the new templates that have been added and some icons.

Is this a positive trend? Yes of course! A lot of the new code isn't just additional fancy features. Sometimes it takes a couple of extra bytes just dealing with stuff under the hood that has no impact whatsoever on the interface. The actual numbers aren't really a measure that can be used, but what is really important to notice is the solid and steady growth. This year has been very busy for me with work but I've always tried to squeeze in a bit of open source work too in the mornings, evenings and lunch breaks. I wish I could focus more on the IssueTrackerProduct but so far we haven't come up with a direct way of getting rich on it so it still remains just a "hobby" for me an my company.

A rather impressive yet useless dependency graph of IssueTracker.py I created this graph simply by downloading py2depgraph.py and depgraph2dot.py from this website

The result is a big ass picture with little boxes that describe each little module that is connected to IssueTracker.py in some way. This image becomes rather useless to me because it digs down into python libs that the code never really goes near. To make this genuinely useful one would have to intercept the .dot file and remove references to libs that aren't interesting.

To me, AJAX (Asyncrounous Javascript And XML) patterns are only interesting if they work as a bonus rather than a must. I've written before about autosaving web forms whereby a form with a big textarea is autosaved on the server every 8 seconds. That feature took existing form functionality and used it in Javascript instead of user actions.

Now I've done it again (actually it was a couple of days ago but I've had time to write about it until now). When you on the IssueTrackerProduct, list issues you'll see a little button that makes it possible to enable "filter options". If you press that button it sets off a GET request to the server to re-request the same page but this time with ShowFilterOptions=true as a parameter. Here's some simplified code:

How can we load the filter options widget on the List Issue page without having to refresh the whole page?

Yesterday I released the IssueTrackerProduct 0.6.9 and after having done that I took a quick LOC count: 10,038 lines of Python code!

That has taken me well over two years but I think most of it has been written in the last year actually. Since the 0.5.2 release (first release on www.issuetrackerproduct.com) it has grown by about 11 lines per day (from 4,000 loc since 11 Dec 2004).

I'm on the lookout for a redesign of the IssueTrackerProduct. Not necessarily a complete redesign but its css and general looks need a serious upgrade. Sure it's built with web standards which means that all that is needed is to change some CSS, but in reality it's harder than that. I think I want to keep the general layout except that when you view a particular issue and I no longer want to center the issue and the followups and I want to have the options such as Subscription and Tell-a-friend in a right-hand menu.

The problem is that of inspiration. All good design I see on Zen Garden is for content that is very different from the issuetracker. For example, the issuetrackerproduct design must bare to do both the issueview and the List Issues which requires the whole screen. It just seems that all good design is made for web blogs which is very far from the issuetracker. I want to see design that is using up 100% of the screensize yet manages to not make the textwidth unreadably wide. Some of these narrow designs can be very nice looking but that's not what I'm after now.