DaveDevelopment::Dave Marshall

We recently started using Redmine as our issue tracking software and we’re very pleased with it. I trialled several alternatives, both open source and commercial, including Jira, FogBugz, Mantis and Trac, but decided on Redmine. Jira and FogBugz look like excellent products, but I don’t feel we would use the extra functionality that warrants the price tag. Mantis looks a bit dated and although it’s been a while, last time I tried to install and configure Trac, it was a bit of a nightmare.

First thing first, here are some of our requirements for an issue tracker:

• Multiple Projects
• Time tracking
• Notifications (email, rss, im etc.)
• Wiki
• SCM integration

Redmine does all of this and a little more, but we haven’t used the other features that much. It does what we want really well, so that’s good enough for us.

What I like

Editing issues in bulk is fantastic. We deploy our application fairly casually, and when we do we set all the issues that have been deployed as closed and assign them a version number. Highlight the issues, right click and set the version number.

The SCM integration does all we need it to. If we add Fixes #500 or Implements #500 to a commit message, issue 500 will be set to resolved and 100% complete and the revision number and commit message appears on the issue’s page. Alternatively, just putting Refs #500 will show the revision number and commit message in the page, without changing the status.

Issues themselves can have custom fields, but we don’t use them all that much. We do make lots of use of the descriptions and notes as they both take wiki markup, meaning we can enter rich text including source code highlighting and images, linking to changesets, wiki pages, target versions, source code and other issues. I like the ability to embed screenshots and call graphs in issues.

What I don’t like

Here’s a couple of things that bother me, if I shift my arse I might look into creating patches for the simple ones.

No API! It would be really nice to have an API and there’s one in the works, but it’s sounds like it’s a bit of a ballache changing fat controllers into fat models.

I often wish a few more items where ‘clickable’. For instance when viewing the issue list, I’d like to be able to click the Category name in one of the rows and see a list of issues for that category.

You can save filters on the issue list, which is ace, but it would be nice if you can ’save as new’. I often create lots of very similar queries and have to build up each one from scratch.

If anybody missed it, the last few days has seen plenty of buzz around a new proposal on how to solve the problem with URL shorteners. I kind of got lost in all the different methods and proposals people are discussing, suggesting or implementing, but I went ahead and added some simple logic to lnkd.in, to do a HTTP HEAD request to the given URL, looking for headers in a couple of the formats suggested. I figured that was going to get out of date pretty quickly, so I modified it to use the RevCanonical API, seems to work pretty well, returning a rev=canonical url wherever possible.

I also contributed a basic bit of code to Rob Allen’s Shorter Links plugin for wordpress, allowing users to specifying a base url, davedevelopment.co.uk isn’t all that good for short URLs. Just need to upgrade the plugin and decide on a short domain for my blog now.

Update: registerd daved.in, works a treat

After seeing a response to a thread on Hacker News, I thought I’d have a crack at making a simple little URL shortener with CodeIgniter. I’ve never used the framework before and it was a nice quick little app to implement and get a feel for things. It’s not quite worthy of competing with Bit.ly or Tinyurl.com, there’s no checking for spam urls etc, but if you want to take a look, the source code is available, as is a live demo at lnkd.in.

It’s been just over a month since I launched zfsnippets.com and I’m very pleased with the reception it got, which spurred me on to try and improve it.

Since then, following suggestions on the feedback forum I’ve implemented a few new features. What I’ve noticed is the ease at which these features where added, thanks to the quality of the Zend Framework.

Favourites

Along with adding icons for up votes, there’s now a little star icon to add snippets to your favourites, easily accessible from your user page. A little sprinkling of dojo and these are added via AJAX.

Revision History

Snippets can now be edited by the creator and a revision history is kept.

Using a simple implementation of the Longest common subsequence problem, you can also view diffs of the revisions.

Search

Lastly there’s the search engine, built on top of Zend_Search_Lucene. This took a little more work, but the results were worth it. I hadn’t realised how powerful the Lucene query language was until now and I’m very impressed with the implementation.

As you would expect, traffic has slowed down considerably since the initial burst, but there’s still a bit of steady traffic there and I hope people keep coming back to visit now and then. As for going forward, I think I’ll add a field to allow contributors to specify which zend framework version their snippet was tested or is compatible with, then look a little more at the scoring system.

The only programming book I use without fail every working day ;)

Seriously though, this book is great.