Re: [Phpwiki-talk] DEFINITION: Ticket Tracking

[Steve W. <sw...@pa...>]

Hi Joe, thanks so much for outlining the whole idea!

I have a question. Are you familiar with the "Category" and "Topic"
conventions used on some Wikis? I think this might work for you. Let me
outline it.

A set of pages in a Wiki that are of a particular category will get a
link placed at the bottom of the page:

CategoryStarTrek

When you go to CategoryStarTrek, the page will describe that category;
by clicking on the page title you will see a list of all pages
belonging to that Category. We use this on SourceForge:

http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php?CategoryNextWiki

For a ticket tracking system, you could just create a page for a
problem (TicketCallBob, TicketFinanceApprove) and put CategoryTicket
at the bottom (or better yet, CategoryTicketOpen, which could become
CategoryTicketClosed when done).

This is simplistic but places all the responsibility for organizing
the data on the users. (Which is the Wiki Way, apparently).

For a very small organization this might be suitable. Your approach makes
the machine do much more of the work.

~swain

On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Joe Edelman wrote:

> Hello everyone.
>
> "Ticket tracking" is like a to-do list for a group of people, or for many
> groups of people.  The phpwiki to-do list on sourceforge is a kind of
> ticket tracker, as are bug trackers like the ones on sourceforge or
> "Bugzilla".  Help desks and call centers often use ticket tracking systems
> to keep track of who they've helped and who else needs help.
>
> Generally a ticket corresponds to some task that needs doing or something
> that needs attention-- a disk that needs to be backed up, or a customer who
> needs to be called back, or a report that needs to be looked over and
> signed by a manager. Tickets begin their lives "open", and when the task is
> completed, they are "closed".  Generally tickets contain some more state
> than just that: they may know what kind of skills are necessary for their
> completion, and they have a log of who has done work towards that ticket
> and any comments they left.  Anyone can log in to the ticket tracking
> system and see, with one search, which "open" (not-yet-completed) tickets
> (tasks) there are for people with their expertise.
>
> What I'm proposing is to add some new syntax to phpWiki pages that
> integrate them into a ticket tracking system, so that if someone writes
> text like "((finance:approve))" in their wiki page-- which means that they
> want someone from the finance department to approve what they've written on
> the page-- then a new ticket will be created which says just that.  If ever
> someone from finance edits the page and removes that text
> ("((finance:approve))"), the ticket is closed.
>
> Other tickets might look like:
>
>         ((sales:rewrite))
>         ((CEO:approve))
>         ((george:explain))
>
> Or, if you're a small company or just a single person, you can use this
> system for reminders for yourself about where in your phpwiki you would
> like some additional information, or what you would like to rewrite, using
> the shorter form:
>
>         ((rewrite))
>         ((check))
>         ((fixme))
>
> And then from one page, the ticket tracking page, you get links to every
> wiki page that needs some work, and you can search or sort through these
> wiki pages based on what kind of expertise they need (sales/CEO/george) or
> what needs to be done (rewrite/approve/explain/check), or when they were
> last worked on, or who entered the request, etc.
>
>
> NOTES AS TO IMPLEMENTATION
>
> 1. It's clear that this feature wouldn't be of use to everyone, and the
>    phpwiki syntax-space is already getting kind of cluttered.  It would be
>    nice, and fairly easy, to be able to turn syntax elements, including
>    ticket recognition ("(())"), on and off.  So maybe a global ("define()")
>    in the index.php file would turn this whole system on and off, and it
>    would be off by default.
>
> 2. The logical time to create/open/close tickets is when the page
>    containing them (or from which they have been deleted) is first saved.
>    Right now the only parsing of page text on save is for converting tabs.
>    This is in savepage.php.  I would have to add something, either there or
>    in WikiDB_PageRevision::createRevision(), that checks for occurrences of
>    the syntax and called out to the ticket functions is they are found.
>
> 3. Seth Cohn writes that phpGroupWare has a nice ticket tracking system.
>    It does.  But phpGroupWare is *big* and one of the nicest things about
>    phpWiki is that it's still pretty simple and small.  So here's what I
>    will do: I will create a small, one page ticket tracker that can be
>    distributed with phpWiki and that uses its own database table, but I
>    will also include glue so that phpWiki can optionally call out to the
>    PHPGW API instead, so that if you already happen to be using PHPGW,
>    phpWiki will register tickets in it.  I've looked at the API, and this
>    shouldn't be too hard.
>
>    I'm not, however, going to do the work to "embed" phpWiki into a PHPGW
>    module.  I have little interest in forcing the wiki into an even smaller
>    box on my browser window, surrounded by even more buttons and menus.
>
> That's all for now.  There are a lot of design decisions I haven't made yet.
> I'll post a summary asking the groups opinion on a number of possibilities
> in the next day or so.
>
> Thanks,
>
>         Joe
>         http://orbis-tertius.net/joe/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Phpwiki-talk mailing list
> Php...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/phpwiki-talk
>

---
                  http://www.panix.com/~swain/
"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring
production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
                     -- Frank Zappa
http://pgp.document_type.org:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xF7323BAC