Archive for the ‘Bugdar’ category

Revision #1000

I thought I’d take a quick break from preparing the Burlan beta and inform you that in the Bugdar repository, I just checked in the 1000th revision. I consider it quite a milestone! About a year and a half of work has gone into this project and I’m completely impressed with the way it has turned out!

Beta 1 is coming soon…. 🙂

Closing the Gap to Burlan

Burlan (Bugdar 1.1) is rapidly approaching feature-complete, which means Beta 1 is close to being a reality. The only feature left to fully develop is the column sorting, customization, and quick filter, which are all rather closely-related.

The administrative control panel has been cleaned up significantly and looks magnificent (though if you’ve used Edoc 2 it won’t be a surprise).

My goal is to have Beta 1 out the door by July 31st and a final, gold version out by September 1st.

If you haven’t already, go checkout the SVN sources and play around!

Codename “Burlan”

To make matters easier for me in my internal code tracking and analysis systems, I’ve code named active development projects. Burlan is a Dacian word meaning “spout” or “water pipe” and is the codename for Bugdar 1.1.

Speaking of Burlan, work continues rather steadily on the project. I’ve been focusing my efforts on the administrative section and implementing APIs and creating a new navigation system (well, the same type of one that exists in Edoc 2). This will lead to the implementation of numerous features that all require admin-side options (like sorting and column arrangement).

And if you have been watching the bug tracker, you’ll notice that Atom syndication has been added!

Working Away

Over the past few days, I’ve been merrily working away at features for Bugdar 1.1. If you haven’t been checking the bug tracker, I’ve already knocked off four features… including notifications.

At the moment, the emails are not very pretty or well-written, but they are sent at the right times. That will all be cleaned up later. I don’t think, however, I’ll add HTML emails for 1.1. That’s something that can be done at a later point.

Notifications Underway

Over the past two days, I’ve been working on one of the biggest features for Bugdar 1.1, the notification system. Luckily, the API system in 1.1 makes implementing this rather straightforward because all the change data is in two arrays (this also made the new logging system much easier).

As a user, you can control the types of email you get based on your relation to the bug (reporter, voter, etc.).

At the moment, I’m implementing the various notice messages for editreport.php. I still have to work on the code for new comments and attachments, but it’s getting there.

This is #11 for your information :).

Work Continues

Just because I haven’t updated the blog in a few weeks does not mean that Bugdar is being left unattended. For the past week or two, I’ve been creating a bunch of APIs and implementing them. This has significantly cleaned up the user-side logic and I’ve caught a few bugs doing it, too.

When I was creating these APIs and reworking the code, I also decided to rewrite the logging mechanism. One of my least favourite things about the 1.0.x branch was this logging system. It was extremely unwieldily and very hard to understand and get right. The new system, however, is much, much, much cleaner and should work better while slightly boosting performance.

I’m currently finishing off implementing the APIs and cleaning up the code (I’m going to be tackling the message reporter/error manager) and then features can finally be added.

And So It Begins…

I’ve finished my AP and SATII exams for a few weeks (which had been previously occupying a significant amount of my time) so now I can really get working on Bugdar.

At the moment, nothing exciting is happening except back-end changes. I’m cleaning up the code quite a bit using the ISSO2 API system, which removes a lot of the insert/update database logic. These APIs will also make it possible to write converters for Bugdar, Mantis, etc. so that those users can switch! Also, APIs will allow customizations to be made much easier (if you’d ever need to change the Bugdar code..?).

I can’t wait to start cracking on the new features, but of course, major back-end changes should be done first to make adding the new features easier.

Edoc 2.0 in Release Candidate Stage

As of now, Edoc 2.0 is feature-complete and everything should be ready for release. I’m now going through and testing all of the functionality to make sure that I’ve ironed out all the bugs I can before I release it. Also, I’m preparing the materials for the www.iris-studios.com site for the release: updating the product page, homepage, etc. and when those are finished I should be ready to release Edoc 2.0! I expect to release Edoc over the weekend or very early (Monday or Tuesday) next week.

Of course, once Edoc is released work on Bugdar 1.1 will get underway. I’m very excited to start knocking off things on my private to-do list and on the public bug tracker. I’ll post regular updates on how work is progressing as I’m developing Bugdar 1.1. I’ll also let you know when the email notifications system is done so that those who are interested can use that feature in the alpha/beta version.

T-48 Hours

With 48 hours left to go before I (intend) to release Bugdar 1.0, I’m starting to get the pre-release chills.

The problem is that Bugdar 1.0 uses ISSO1–which does not have a lot of the really cool new modules in ISSO2. One of these modules is an API class which allows for a unique implementation of ActiveRecord that makes database interaction quite simple. At the moment, there’s a lot of top-down logic in Bugdar and I really would like to remove it, but because ISSO2 isn’t ready, I’m not able to take advantage of it.

So why don’t I just back-port the API module? Well, it uses some of the new ISSO2 kernel methods and I also want to implement a new feature in it (relations between API classes–which will be quite helpful).

And the lack of an APIs in Bugdar means that there’s no import system from Bugzilla, Mantis, Flyswatter, etc. which is where I hope people will move from. Without the APIs, it’ll be quite a paint to write the importers–so I’m holding off on writing those.

So importers are deferred to the next major release–which is months away. I don’t want people to wait that long, but I also want new features. So I think I’ll be splitting up the feature list for 1.1 (which is now rather lengthy–most of which will be easy to implement once the logic is cleaned up with the API system) into two parts: quick features that won’t take long and aren’t very innovative, and then the way cool features for 1.2. And of course, the importers will be released in 1.1 when all the logic goes to APIs.

That aside, I’m very proud of Bugdar 1.0. At the moment, I’m hunting down bugs and doing a whole bunch of testing in everything I can possibly think of. Also, I’m continuing to write the administrative documentation. Currently, the entire administrative control panel has been documented in full, but things like installation have not. Finally, I’m starting to write the updates to the main website that will go live upon release.

So, T-48 hours until lift off…

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