June – 2014 – Andriy Lesyuk site

June 2014

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?!.

Redmine › WikiNG: Three ways to add custom HTML content to Wiki in Redmine

Added by Andriy Lesyuk 10 years ago

It’s absolutely common for a Redmine user to ask: How do I add custom HTML code to the Wiki content? Here by Wiki content users usually mean not just a Wiki page, as in Redmine a Wiki syntax enabled content is used everywhere (well, almost) – in project description, in issue description, in news, in comments, and so on. Anyway, normally, for Redmine such inquisitive persons get quick and definite answer: There is no way!..

As this is a common question, certainly, I used to ask it too. But, as I’m a Redmine plugin developer, I was able to “give” a different answer… Depending on the features, I developed, I used to implement some capabilities for embeding custom HTML code into different places of Redmine interface. There were no plan or design – I just implemented, what I thought at that moment can be reasonable and needful. Only after implementing those things I realized, that in several my plugins I implemented almost the same feature – the possibility to embed custom HTML code into the Wiki content. Luckily it was implemented in different ways…

To be more precise this was done in two my plugins – in Hooks Manager and in WikiNG. As some of these features are not foremost and, therefore, can be unnoticed and as the feature is commonly asked, I decided to describe its implementations in this article.

Redmine › SCM Creator (+Github): Using Github repositories with Redmine

Added by Andriy Lesyuk 10 years ago

Github is the most popular online service for hosting and collaborative development of open source projects. And Redmine is the most popular personal and enterprise open source project hosting and management solution. So, no wonder, that these two systems are used together quite often.

Thus, Github’s Redmine service hook can be used to trigger fetching of repository updates by Redmine, when new commits are made to the Github repository. Unfortunately, it’s useless for the pure Redmine, as Redmine is not able to work with Github repositories directly (only through the local Git mirror, which needs to be created and updated manually)… Moreover, I am not aware of any solution, which could be used for this (even through the mirror).

Certainly, Redmine (especially its community) does much more to support Github. Thus, there is the plenty of tutorials describing how to mirror and keep Github repositories in sync for Redmine (e.g., this or this). Also there exist special plugins for making Github repositories easier usable under Redmine. The most noticeable such plugin is Github hook authored by Jakob Skjerning.

Redmine » Themes › Red-Andy: Red-Andy 1.00 – the first responsive theme for Redmine (3 comments)

Added by Andriy Lesyuk 10 years ago

MobileRed-Andy

The idea of the responsive layout is to allow viewing the website on devices with small screens. To make this possible the browser should be able to change the layout depending on the available screen width of the device. What and how should be done is described using the CSS3 media rules…

In fact, there already were some attempts to make the Redmine layout responsive… The best known one was made by Xander Dumaine, but his theme is not maintained and currently is available generally as the article describing how to make a responsive theme for Redmine (nevertheless, I used his article a little to make Red-Andy responsive). There is also the RedmineCRM theme of Kirill Bezrukov, which is described as “responsive”, but I have not found any proof of this (neither a screenshot, nor any code making it really responsive – looks like Kirill meant something else, when described the theme this way)… Considering this Red-Andy 1.00 seems to be the first (and only) responsive theme for Redmine!