If you use Redmine versions intensively, eventually you will want to have a flexible global versions overview, where you’ll be able to: list upcoming versions of all your projects, evaluate their status and progress, check their due dates in order to plan the release schedule, and so on. Unfortunately, the pure Redmine comes only with a simple per-project version list, which cannot even be sorted or filtered, or customized in any other way. Obviously, this functionality is too limited for many advanced use cases.
Announcements
Redmine plugin showing logs for outgoing emails
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Sometimes it’s important to know, if the user should have received the email notification generated by Redmine. Especially, if usage of Redmine in your organization relies on email integration (for example, if it’s configured to receive user comments, such as issue notes and message replies, via email). In such cases, some users may use Redmine user interface very rarely as all the communication can be made through emails.
Until now it was impossible to determine using Redmine, if the particular email notification was sent to the particular user. For this, you would need to dig into the logs of the message transfer agent (MTA) (if you had access to those logs, of course). Even so, it was not easy to link records in such logs to certain email notifications.
Mastering Redmine: The project reviewed in the book is now live
To demonstrate, what is Redmine and how it works, in Mastering Redmine I create a special demo project. This project is about the book, so the latter can be considered to be about the former as well (yes, it’s about Redmine, but uses the project as a sample). And, for the second edition of the book… Yes, I work on its second edition right now, if you have not yet been aware. So, for the second edition I do the same – i.e., create a demo project on a demo Redmine installation. But, this time the installation is… live!
Mastering Redmine: Second edition announcement
Recently I was contacted by an editor from Packt Publishing asking me to update the book. To be honest, for me it’s not a good time for an additional work (I have many other things to do), but this book is like my kid and it really needs my attention. So, I agreed (having negotiated a reasonable schedule, of course). In other words, let me announce the second edition of the Mastering Redmine book, which is going to be published at the start of 2016.
Redmine › ISSUE-id: Sequent issue numbers with the project key
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Currently, I use Atlassian JIRA on my job at Kayako – I use Redmine for my personal projects. And still I like Redmine more! But, what I like in JIRA is sequent numbers plus the project key in issue IDs. There are many benefits to such issue numbers, some of them are: a) you easily see how many issues the project has, b) it’s much easier to remember issue IDs (even if numbers are four-digit – not sure why, maybe because you follow numbers increasing), c) you always know, which project the issue is for. These are no way critical benefits for me, but one day I got interested – how the similar can be implemented for Redmine. So, I started to experiment… And eventually here goes the result of the experiment – the ISSUE-id plugin for Redmine!
Redmine › Subscription: Getting email notifications about major project events
There are many complaints, that Redmine is sending too many notifications and is missing functionality to configure them properly… So why then writing this plugin? I believe the problem is in what it sends. You can choose either to receive everything including issue changes, notes, Wiki changes, new messages in boards and so on or just issues. That’s either too much or too little.
Saying I’m just a user of a project. How do I know, when a new version is released?.. Yes, I can subscribe to RSS., but which RSS? News?.. Okay, I can do this. Since Redmine 2.5.x I can even watch news! Assuming, that there will be a news posted about the new release. But, what if not?.. Can I subscribe to files?.. No! Also, there can be no files in the project – users can get code from, e.g., Git. Maybe I can subscribe to versions?.. No! I can subscribe to activities RSS, but it has the same issue as email notifications – too much data! So I can’t know, when new version comes?!.
Projects: Another Redmine versions support policy change
Till now I was trying to make all my plugins work under the common preselected set of recent Redmine and ChiliProject versions (thus, till recently they were: Redmine 1.4.x, 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x and ChiliProject 3.x). So, before releasing any of my plugins I had to test it under all such versions. Certainly, usually there appeared many compatibility issues, which I had to fix.
This approach generally failed… To support so many versions I needed much time, that I did not have due to different reasons – once the reason was the book, I was writing, another time it was stress, I had due to the severe crisis in Ukraine. The time comes and I write more new plugins, what, certainly, makes their support even more complicated. So, I believe, it’s the time to reduce the number of versions, I aim to support…
Projects: Announcement about Redmine < 1.4.x and ChiliProject < 3.x
Many of you, perhaps, wondered why I supported such old Redmine versions as 1.0.x? The answer is simple: cause I used (and still do) Redmine 1.0.1!.. But why?..
I used to work as a Linux system administrator, so I know, what is the security and how important is to have a well tested and well maintained installation. For this reason I chose Debian as my server platform. Debian is, however, known to have outdated package versions… But there is a reason why it happens. Debian has three “branches”: unstable, testing and stable. To get into the stable branch a package needs to pass the unstable branch, where it gets tested, and wait for a release in the testing branch, where the whole system gets tested once again.
Mastering Redmine: My book announcement
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I guess sizes of news and Wiki pages, which has been written by me so far, indicate, that I like writing to some extent… I don’t feel it this way though (it’s quite complicated for me to, but, I believe, that it’s the integral part of the good development process, so that’s why I do this usually). Or, maybe, I just don’t know myself well enough?..
Having started to deal with Redmine and having noticed, what kind of mistakes its users usually do, I got the feeling, that I would like to create a blog some day, where I would discuss such issues (by the way, I still want to do this)… I really had a lot of ideas, what to write about for Redmine, and even started to note them.
Redmine › Contact Form: Will drop the “Project” field
It’s not a secret that all of my plugins I wrote initially for myself. The contact form was one of them.
I have many plugins on my site so I need the “Project” field to determine what project a request is related to. But this is not a common situation perhaps and I guess there are users who do not need the “Project” field?.. For example, if there is only one project on site or if projects are not visible.
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