I've been reviewing issue tracking software, but I'm not finding anything I'd consider particularly user-friendly. And by "user" I mean end-user/client, not me.
I volunteered to do the website for the church where my wife works. I know there's going to be a variety of requests and feedback as we go along, and I'd rather not try to track it all via email. I'd prefer to have them enter their requests (bug, feature, to-do, support) into a web site where I can manage them all.
Everything I look at requires too much knowledge on the part of the client. Even ticketing systems seem to expect a technical audience, and they don't have the issue management support that I want as a developer.
BugZilla is way overkill. Mantis and Eventum look promising for other projects I'm doing, but are too technical for this. Drupal Project* looked promising, but turns out to not only be too technical, but too specific to Drupal itself.
I strongly prefer PHP/MySQL solutions, although Python, Ruby, and Postgres are also supported by my hosting service. Open Source is pretty much a requirement, my budget is $0 (which eliminates things like BaseCamp).
Any suggestions?
roll your own
I've used a number of bug/issue tracking systems over the last several years. They all seem to be pretty technical in nature and not for your average end user. There is no way my mom could easily navigate any of the ones I've seen.
So, my solution would be to roll your own system and make it easy for end users. You said you needed something simple. I'd build something in drupal using CCK, Views, and Taxonomy. Use Taxonomy to identify the type of request (bug, feature, etc.), CCK to add fields for the type if information you want to collect, and Views to create the different lists of issues.
Then, theme everything so it's easy to use.
This is the drupal solution. I'm sure you could do something similar with other systems. But, for what you are asking for I think the custom solution will work out the best for the end users.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
Yeah...
Yeah, I agree with Matt here. What you're asking is exactly what I've been thinking about lately...rolling my own very simple bug tracking system for drupal.
Most systems (ahem, cough, project module, cough) are waaaay overkill for most users.
If you can build your own, I say go for it. Someday I'll talk MF into rolling my concept for this into a module.
-Rob Feature
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.mustardseedmedia.com
Project Module not meant for this
Project module isn't meant to be an issue tracking system. It goes way way beyond that. It's really designed to manage software projects as a whole. So, it's overkill.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
casetracker
You may want to checkout casetracker:
http://drupal.org/project/case...
I am testing it now to replace our eticket support ticket system at work. Integrates with cck, views, mailhandler, etc so you can do some cool things with it.
Interesting. Thanks for the
Interesting. Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a spin.
That's probably the best
That's probably the best solution. Unfortunately I haven't done much with theming Drupal yet. I'll give it a shot.
Excel
I know many of you are cringing right now with this solution. But how many people do you know that use Excel as a word processor as well. I consider myself a pretty advanced Excel user, and most people at work consider me an Excel wizard. So I do not say this lightly.
So what I have done is made an Excel workbook with MANY tabs. I have a summary page in the front which link to each one of those pages so it is easy to find. On that summary page it also lists certain information such as status, summary and start/finished dates. The tab shows very detailed information with certain areas for the user to fill in the necessary information.
Granted, this is not a great solution, but I have found that it works because people are comfortable with using Excel. And the same can be done using OpenOffice as well.
Rick
Not User Friendly
I've used what you are describing. For most people it's just not user friendly. And, unless you have some shared drive it's not easy to submit, update, and get to.
In corporate environments where you have a bunch of excel weenies (I'm one of them) this can work. Otherwise I'd recommend staying away from this.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
Your dead on.
1) Must have shared drive.
2) Took weeks to tweak to make everyone happy and easy to use.
3) Users must be able to give feedback on how the sheet is working for them.
4)I am sure I will think of something to say why you are right.
hehe, I think I am just glad to be back posting on G&G since I took about a month off. Thanks for your clarification on what would be necessary for this to work MF. :)
That could be handy on my
That could be handy on my desktop, but doesn't work with a remote client. If the client isn't going to have access anyway then I'd probably just use Eventum or Mantis on my laptop.
selfless plug and shameless plug
Here's a guy who is in the process of writing a very user friendly tracker. I don't know what the status is, or even what the technology is.
Meanwhile...I'm the author of a free, open source issue tracker that I think would fit your requirements EXCEPT it's the wrong technology. It's BugTracker.NET, based on C# and SQL Server. But other than that, one of my design goals was to make it a good fit for exactly your scenario, a simple tracker that you share with your customers.
For example, it's very configurable in both directions. That is, you can not only add additional custom fields, you can also hide all the out-of-the-box fields. Take a look at the very simple bottom screenshot here.
You can also change the skin, so that it's branded with your company logo, etc. Shown here.
You can try JTrac
JTrac is very easy to install and very user friendly.
Free and Open Source - but it is written in Java, so I'm not sure if it fits your hosting constraints.
RT
I'm going to go out a bit and probably not answer your question, but I think the most user friendly systems are mostly invisible to the user. RequestTracker (Perl,MySQL,Apache,Linux) has an email bridge and is free open source software. Problem is you probably couldn't run it in a hosted environment. You'll want your own box to load all the perl dependencies and config the mail server the way you need it. It isn't a simple setup, but it sure does work nice and is highly customizable. NASA agrees as demonstrated in the fact that they use it. :-) O'reilly's written a book on it also.
http://bestpractical.com/rt/