Effective Project Management with Trac

Before showing off the snipets that I wrote for Trac Reports I’d like to give you one little hint if you’re running Trac on an old (but stable) OS version, such as Fedora Core 8. Amazon EC2 still ships the Fedora 8 operating system as default for Linux-based EC2 instances, and a simple yum install trac will get you version 0.10.x, which is outdated. The trick here is to install:

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yum install python-setuptools
yum install python-setuptools-devel

Which include a package called easy_install. Since you’ve got an old version of Trac installed, use easy_install to update it, like this:

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easy_install -U trac

Bam! Wasn’t that easy? One more situation where you can use easy_install is to install Trac plugins directly from their repositories (instead of the old way by uploading source files).

Okay, now back to the reports. I made these with a little experimenting with the Trac database. It’s structure is pretty much transparent and obvious, so if you’re an SQL genius then go ahead and write your own. Here’s my most useful list …

1. All Tickets Reported by Me

This report is very useful to track the status of all your tickets. Shows all types of tickets in all states (opened, closed). Have you ever submitted a ticket and then couldn’t find it in your submitted tickets because it was marked as fixed or wontfix? Here’s the SQL query:

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SELECT p.value AS __color__,
    (CASE STATUS WHEN 'accepted' THEN 'Accepted'
        WHEN 'new' THEN 'New' 
        WHEN 'owned' THEN 'Owned' 
        WHEN 'closed' THEN 'Closed' 
        WHEN 'assigned' THEN 'Assigned' 
    ELSE 'Unknown' END) AS __group__,
 
    id AS ticket, summary, component, milestone,
    t.type AS type, priority, time AS created,
    changetime AS _changetime, description AS _description, owner
 
    FROM ticket t
    LEFT JOIN enum p ON p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
    WHERE reporter = $USER
    ORDER BY (STATUS = 'accepted') DESC, (STATUS = 'assigned') DESC, 
        (STATUS = 'new') DESC, CAST(p.value AS int), milestone, t.type, time

2. All Tickets Owned by Me

This report is useful to track your own status. See your active tickets, new ones and once that have been closed.

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SELECT p.value AS __color__,
    (CASE STATUS WHEN 'accepted' THEN 'Accepted' 
    WHEN 'closed' THEN 'Closed' ELSE 'Owned' END) AS __group__,
 
    id AS ticket, summary, component, version, milestone,
    t.type AS type, priority, time AS created,
    changetime AS _changetime, description AS _description,
    reporter AS reporter
 
    FROM ticket t
    LEFT JOIN enum p ON p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
    WHERE owner = $USER
    ORDER BY (STATUS = 'accepted') DESC, (STATUS = 'assigned') DESC, 
        (STATUS = 'closed') DESC, CAST(p.value AS int), milestone, t.type, time

3. Assigned and Accepted Tickets by Owner

Such reports are very useful to track the workflow of all the Trac contributors on one page.

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SELECT p.value AS __color__,
    (CASE STATUS WHEN 'accepted' THEN 'Accepted by: ' 
        WHEN 'assigned' THEN 'Assigned to: ' END) || 
    owner AS __group__,
 
    id AS ticket, summary, component, milestone, t.type AS type, time AS created,
    changetime AS _changetime, description AS _description, priority, reporter
 
    FROM ticket t
    LEFT JOIN enum p ON p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
    WHERE STATUS = 'assigned' OR STATUS = 'accepted'
    ORDER BY owner, CAST(p.value AS int), t.type, time

4. Active Tickets by Milestone

Track the overall progress of the development team, see what’s left to do until a certain milestone is reached.

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    SELECT p.value AS __color__,
    'Milestone '||milestone AS __group__,
    id AS ticket, summary, component, version, t.type AS type, 
    owner, STATUS, time AS created, changetime AS _changetime,
    description AS _description, reporter AS _reporter
 
    FROM ticket t
    LEFT JOIN enum p ON p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
    WHERE STATUS <> 'closed' 
    ORDER BY (milestone IS NULL), 
        milestone, CAST(p.value AS int), t.type, time

5. Closed Tickets by Owner

Finally, this report is extremely useful to track progress by owner. Shows clearly what the contributors have been up to lately.

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    SELECT p.value AS __color__,
    owner AS __group__,
    id AS ticket, summary, component, milestone, t.type AS type, 
    time AS created, changetime AS _changetime, description AS _description, 
    priority, reporter
 
    FROM ticket t
    LEFT JOIN enum p ON p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
    WHERE STATUS = 'closed'
    ORDER BY owner, CAST(p.value AS int), t.type, time

Sweet eh? As you can see this is pretty much basic stuff and there are tonnes of other useful reports that have to be created, but these are the essentials. If you’ve got your own reports to share, you’re welcome via comments ;)

Happy project managing!

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Davis Got 4500 Followers in 6 Months

When the new Retweet API came along, I wrote an RT module which uses the Twitter Search API to find relevant tweets and users, then retweets those messages or just somehow interacts with a user. As soon as the Twitter Lists API was announced, I started working on the Lists module, which eventually became a simple “sorting-the-tweeps” based on their keywords – web design, design, wordpress, etc. Soon enough, I found out that Lists couldn’t contain more than 500 members (although some glitch made 501 possible). Web design 2, wordpress 2, etc wouldn’t be as fancy. I also tried building a conversation list of tweeps that by any means talked to the robot, but then again, the 500 limit broke all my hopes ;)

There were other modules which I worked on really hard, such as RThx module or Random Buzz, DM Control. Some of them worked, some of them were turned off after a few days (yes, you guessed it – Random Buzz, that really made some noize ;)

So, what did I achieve? Me – nothing. Michael did though, in 6 months he went up to 4500+ followers, while following a little more than 200 people himself, has been featured in ~ 250 lists, sent ~ 55,000 tweets and retweets all based on four keywords (or hashtags) – design, web design, wordpress and jquery. Built 4 lists based on these keywords, 500 members in each. Total list followers is a little less than 150 (which is quite good actually).

For comparison take a look at my account – (@kovshenin), in a little bit more than a year I got ~ 1700 followers. It took Michael a couple of months to reach that. The chart below illustrates the followers growth during the last three months. Human (me – blue) vs Robot (Michael – red). Yeah, I added a new module in mid December ;)

I manually logged into Michael’s account recently to check out how he’s doing, and I was kind of surprised to see that people really are talking to the guy, thanking him for retweets, asking him for further reads, wishing him a great day and handing over some coffee. Michael doesn’t usually reply to these and he’s a little bit shy sometimes, besides, he never drinks coffee ;)

A few days ago I decided to give Michael a rest, so tuned his backend to a new Twitter account with a few different settings, especially in timing. I’ll be switching to other keywords and feeds in the next few weeks. So let’s see if he’s as good as Michael, or perhaps better? ;)

I’m not sure what I’ll do with Michael’s account. TweetValue said it’s worth over $5k … anyone? ;) Or should I just throw it away.. Or run a contest for his password? …

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1. Twitter Robot in PHP: Twibots Draft
2. Compatibility: Twitter Tools & Twitter Friendly Links
3. The Twitter API v2 Transition

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<a name="bookmark"></a>Bookmark Text <!-- Bad! -->
<a name="bookmark">Bookmark Text</a> <!-- Good! -->

Keep that in mind ;) Cheers!

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Facebox: Creating Facebook-like Dialogs

The problem with Facebox is the lightbox placement. The dialog itself is placed in the center of the page horizontally with a preset margin from the top, which looks good, but what I did notice is that the box containing the loading icon is being placed somewhere to the left part of the page. Well at least on Firefox 3.5.7.

I couldn’t help but noticing that FamSpam and StaffTool are using a different set of functions and styles for the lightbox placement and copying them into my code solved the issue.

The two functions are called getPageScroll() and getPageHeight() and are marked as quirksmode.com inside the code. The #facebox style in the CSS lacked a width: 100% which seems to have solved the issue for now. There’s also a certain overlay in the original version which includes an interesting IE6 hack:

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height: expression(document.body.scrollHeight > document.body.offsetHeight ?
	document.body.scrollHeight : document.body.offsetHeight + 'px');

The versions at Stafftool and FamSpam however don’t mention any overlays in there code. Pretty messy, huh? Well, other than that, the plugin is very lightweight and cross-browser, works well in IE and closes the popup when pressing Esc, which unfortunately has to be hand-coded in other versions of the Facebook-style dialog boxes.

Grab the code at GitHub and enjoy: Facebox for jQuery.

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Neat Transitions with the jQuery Cycle Plugin

Pager is nothing but a few links next to your cycling block with page numbers, which switch the cycle upon click. It’s very useful when you have to create, say a list of services a company provides, with sweet lightboxes (don’t confuse with the Lightbox plugin), perhaps with some images, cycling through their descriptions, yet we’d like our visitors to be able to switch through the services manually, without having to wait. This is exactly what the Pager transition does, but hey, who the hell would want page numbers instead of their services names?

This is where pageAnchorBuilder comes in, and it’s not quite obvious what has to be done to make this work. According to the jQuery Cycle documentation it’s:

pageAnchorBuilder – callback function for building anchor links: function(index, DOMelement)

So here’s a demonstration of how this would work. Let’s setup a quick cycle, with a few options. Perhaps you’ll need more than I listed below ;)

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jQuery('#fade').before('<div id="nav" class="nav"></div>').cycle({
	pager: '#nav',
	pagerAnchorBuilder: paginate
});

So paginate is a callback function which takes two arguments, the index and the DOM element. Using the index will work just fine. Let’s see how this works with text:

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function paginate(ind, el) 
{
	if (ind == 0) return '<span>Service One</span>';
	else if (ind == 1) return '<span>Service Two</span>';
	// and so on
}

I think that’s pretty straightforward once you understand how it works. Let’s try some images:

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function paginate(ind, el) 
{
	return '<img src="http://whatever.com/services/service' + ind + '.jpg" />';
}

So name your images service0.jpg, service1.jpg, etc. And my favourite, CSS classes:

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function paginate(ind, el) 
{
	return '<div class="service' + ind + '"></div>';
}

Then just add a few .service0, .service1, etc. classes in your stylesheet, voila! Hope that helps, and don’t forget about the other useful options. Cheers!

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2. Loading jQuery from a CDN in WordPress
3. Extending the jQuery Lightbox Plugin: Custom Link

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thank you for your support and voting at WordPress.org ;)

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Provide Support to Your WordPress Clients

Yeah, with this plugin you’ll get rid of the annoying phonecalls and tweets. Technical Support for WordPress (formely called Bug Reporting for WordPress) adds a dashboard widget to the WordPress admin panel, where your clients could file a support ticket in only a few clicks! Pick a topic, write a title, describe the issue, send. Voila! You will receive the filed report by e-mail, well formatted and with all the necessary details. You can then take action, and finally reply to the e-mail when everything’s done.

This is one side of it. The second side is that the plugin is totally customizable, the subject and message format are powered by short tags, the topic list is customizable, and of course the company (provider) name and email address. This means that you can include a certain tag, keyword or whatever to the subject line, say “#CompanyName” then filter that in Gmail or whatever, and make different clients go to different folders. There, no more junk in your Inbox!

Okay there’s a second side, this means that there should be a third. What about branding? The plugin permits you to have a provider name, provider URL and a provider logo! Which will be displayed in your clients’ dashboards and will link directly to your website. That way, your clients will keep you in mind, 24/7! Ok, kidding, but it’s really good for branding..

Now, I know you already want this and can’t wait to download it, but hey, the request hasn’t been approved by the WordPress.org Plugin Directory yet, so as soon as it does, we’ll go live. Meanwhile take a look at these screenshots:

 

Looking forward to your comments, feature requests, etc ;)

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Adding the Source URL Module to Contact Form 7

First of all I’d like to note that he plugin is very well written, it’s very, and I mean VERY flexible, and only due to its flexibility we’re allowed to extend its functionaltiy. Of course Takayuki’s probably missed some filters and hooks that other plugin and theme developers would love to see, but the modules directory is good enough, despiting the fact that it’ll probably be erased and rewritten after an ongoing plugin update.

Now, suppose you have designed a placed a contact form in your sidebar as a widget, using the Contact Form 7 shortcode. It’s got all the necessary fields, AJAX powered form, Akismet spam check & so on. But we’re missing something. Contact Form 7 is located in your sidebar, which means that you’re displaying it on most (if not all) of your posts and pages. Now when somebody writes a message via your contact form, you’re left guessing which page the visitor was viewing while typing.

This may be crucial in e-commerce situations, say you’re selling books from your blog, and a visitor contacts you to ask “who’s the publisher of this book?” or “how many pages does this book have?”. So you received an e-mail and you have no idea which book is being mentioned. You’re lucky if you only work with one publisher, or all your books are 100 pages long ;)

Anyways, let’s create a new file in the modules folder of the plugin, and call it sourceurl.php:

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wpcf7_add_shortcode('sourceurl', 'wpcf7_sourceurl_shortcode_handler', true);
 
function wpcf7_sourceurl_shortcode_handler($tag) {
	if (!is_array($tag)) return '';
 
	$name = $tag['name'];
	if (empty($name)) return '';
 
	$html = '<input type="hidden" name="' . $name . '" 
		value="http://' . $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] . '" />';
	return $html;
}

This is very easy to understand once you’ve read (and understood) what’s written in the other modules. Try to take a look at text.php for a while, it includes the code for both text and e-mail fields. I copied some of the code for the text fields, simplified it a little and removed the validation process (why validate our own URL?), and voila, 12 lines of code ;)

Save the file and go to your Contact Form 7 settings in your WordPress admin panel. Select the contact form you’d like to add source URL to and in the part where it says “Form” add the new short code (sourceurl) and give it a name (thesource):

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[sourceurl thesource]

Now you can use “thesource” in your Mail part of the contact form settings, say:

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Source URL: <a href="[thesource]">[thesource]</a><br />

Then look for the new Source URL in your e-mail ;) So if you’ve used more than one contact form on several different pages, just to distinguish them in your emails, you can merge them into one now. You can use a similar way to add other interesting data to your e-mails such as, say the user’s IP address for instance, browser capabilities, etc.

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Drop that phpMyAdmin Stuff, it's for Kids! ;)

Most of you probably used the MySQL GUI Tools bundle, which is very similar to what phpMyAdmin is – database tweaking, user management, structure design, query builder, etc. Browsing up to the usual MySQL GUI Tools place a few days ago, I encountered the following message:

Users of the MySQL GUI Tools Bundle should plan to upgrade to MySQL Workbench. MySQL Workbench provides DBAs and developers an integrated tools environment for:

• Database Design & Modeling
• SQL Development (replacing MySQL Query Browser)
• Database Administration (replacing MySQL Administrator)

So we’re now forced to upgrade to MySQL Workbench. Honestly, for a moment there I though that it’s just a naming issue, and that MySQL GUI Tools has gone so far, that the guys from Sun Microsystems decided to ship the bundle as a single product – MySQL Workbench, but I was wrong. Browsing the MySQL Workbench website I noticed the archive, which dates back to Novermber 8th, 2007! So it seems that they’ve just merged the two pieces.

MySQL Workbench is far more professional then the GUI Tools, but may be complicated at first sight. And the most funny thing about it is that the MySQL GUI Tools leads to a page to download the 5.1 community version of MySQL Workbench, which unfortunatelly does not have all the promised features (SQL development, data modelling, server administration), and there’s no home screen at all, which is shown on each and every screenshot related to the move!

I thought something was wrong, so I went back to the Workbench homepage, browsed the blogs, forums and downloads. It turned out that 5.2 is the one we were supposed to move to, but it’s still in beta, thus hidden in the downloads. After installing MySQL Workbench 5.2 I finally managed to get to the promising home screen, a little bit fancier than 5.1, and very similar to what we used to see in MySQL GUI Tools, plus the improvements.

Here are a few screenshots:

 

So I hope to see the 5.2 release very very soon, and, oh come on, drop the phpMyAdmin stuff, that’s for kids ;)

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• Tweets around the clock
• Tweets from RSS feeds, supporting prefix and postfix text (for adding hashtags)
• Retweet via the Twitter Search API and build conversation lists
• Shoot random sentences at users who mention you, thank them for retweets
• Control your robot via your own Twitter account by sending him direct messages
• All this is Twitter OAuth powered, no password required
• Such robots are called Twibots

Create Your Own Twitter Robot in PHP

Now, before downloading the code, I have to warn you that it’s completely unorganized. The code is horrible, comments are awkward, the database being used is SQLite (just for the fun of it) and it’s very very glitchy. Be prepared for Twitter suspending your account for ’strange activity’ and use this at your own risk, don’t run here blaming me for that ;) I also suggest you’d contact Twitter to get your IP addresses and Twitter account white-listed before you start, especially if you plan to tweet very often (which I wouldn’t recommend). Use this at your own risk, and please keep my copyrights and preferably the OAuth application IDs.

Download: here (version 0.1)

Operation Instructions.. To say the truth it’s pretty tough, no web interface, not buttons, no config files. There are a bunch of files there, some of them useless. There’s the Snoopy class for reading and parsing RSS, there’s the Twitter OAuth class, and two core php files – cron.php and oauth.php. Open up cron.php, there are some comments and examples there. Make sure you get your own bit.ly API key and secret. Also make sure you get a connection with the twibots.sqlite database which has a couple of empty tables. Those will be used for tokens and dump data for unrepeated tweets.

Once you’re done configuring, use the command-line php in order to make it work. It goes something like this:

# php cron.php oauth register
# Please browse to https://twitter.com/…
# php cron.php oauth validate 123465
# Authentication successful, greetings @ev ;)

# php cron.php random
# tweeting a random RSS feed …

# php cron.php reply
# sending replies…

# php cron.php dm
# reading direct messages

# php cron.php retweet
# retweeting…

You’ll have to put that in your crontab file and launch by schedule. Don’t run them too often though, as Twitter doesn’t like flooding, especially from newly created accounts. Any questions or suggestions are welcome in the comments below, but please, don’t tell me the code is horrible, I know it is, and I wouldn’t have posted it if you didn’t ask ;) Cheers!

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