August, 2008

example / general / how-to / software / technical — 1 Comment
25
Aug 08

Trac ticket: reset to new

We have recently moved from Mantis to Trac at work for our bug/task tracking, but we have encountered a slight issue with Trac’s workflow management. The issue is that we wanted to be able to move a ticket from the ‘assigned’ state to the ‘new’ state. This is a common scenario if a team member leaves or goes on holiday while they have tasks assigned to them. Quite often you wouldn’t just want to blindly ‘reassign’ these issues to another member, but reset them to their new status so another member can pick the task up when they have the time.

We decided to introduce a new state called ‘reset’ in the trac.ini [ticket-workflow] block which allows us to easily reset a ticket to the ‘new’ status as if it had just been created in the system. The new block looks like this:

reset = * -> new
reset.operations = del_resolution
reset.permissions = TICKET_MODIFY

Now at the bottom of each ticket, we have an option which says:

[ ] reset  Next status will be 'new'

Hope this works for you too :)

general / project / software — 9 Comments
9
Aug 08

Tweete : a New Mobile Twitter Client

After months of complaining about the lack of features on the official mobile twitter client, and the download overhead of slandr, I decided to write my own mobile twitter client. One that focuses on most needed functionality without the huge download overhead. I call it Tweete.

I’m still working on Tweete, but at the moment I have a beta release running that you are welcome to try out which you can find here: m.tweete.net. I’ve tried to keep the pages fairly light, at the moment each page is around 5k, which is roughly the same as the official mobile twitter client, but Tweete has extra features. Slandr on the other hand is around 25k per page load (last time I checked). My mobile handset browser (WM6 IE) doesn’t support gzipping content, so I’ve tried to make pages as light as possible without gzipping.

To use Tweete, simply login with your twitter login details and away you go; no need to create an account or maintain another password.

Currently the following features are implemented in Tweete:

  • Send updates
  • User & friends timeline (with pagination)
  • View replies
  • View direct messages & send direct messages
  • Pagination for direct messages & replies
  • Mirrored Twitter URL structure
  • User profiles
  • Follow & Unfollow users
  • API Limit handling

The following features are planned:

  • Delete tweets & direct messages

And the following may or may not be implemented:

  • Customize css colours from twitter account settings

If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to contact me with them (or leave a ticket at the Tweete Trac page) and I’ll see what I can do :)

For those of you who are interested in implementation details; I used the Kohana PHP Framework. Kohana is designed from ground up as a lightweight secure php framework for rapid application development. I have had a look at a number of frameworks for php, and in my opinion, is the most easy and logical to use.