vsbabu.org

CMFCollectorNG

Andreas Jung released the next generation issue tracker tool that can be used within CMF. CMFCollectorNG. In my opinion, here are the best features:

• very generic to add new ticket properties to a tracker
• enhanced tracker configuration through the web
• tickets can have references to other tickets (also across CMFCollectorNG instances)
• INTEGRATION with CMF! Use the framework, Luke.

CMF is a really good community building tool. Now, any team or community should have some goals - if it doesn’t, then you’ve a non-technical and much bigger problem. Once you’ve goals, you will need to track those, whether these be issues or just projects.

Everywhere I look around, people are engrossed in finding the perfect tracking tool. Sorry folks, one doesn’t exist. It is like the perfect editor or the perfect religion. I think people should just try to change their business processes to suit one tool instead of trying to write new tools. If you don’t have agile processes then process definition has some serious drawbacks

Anyway, take a look at an older collector at plone. Just what more do you need?

• Joel on Software - painless bug tracking and painless software scheduling.
• Jeffrey Shell’s Zope archives.

1. One thing behind the search for the perfect issue tracker is that - at least for Zope/Python - many of the projects are either immature or abandoned. Tracker is wonderful, but slow. It has no future, and it apparently doesn't work with Zope 2.6. As far as configuration, nice emails, and inter-issue linking went, it was a nice system.

   CMF Collector is a half released product. (Then again, so is Tracker, since you have to effectively download it out of CVS). It's hard to put an issue tracker in place to aid software configuration management that has little or no solid releases to fall back on.

   Jens Vagelpohl's new JTracker product looks nice, simple, and fast. But it's missing a couple of key features. Jens is a good developer, and I'm interested in using it to replace our current Tracker scenario.

   Roundup is pretty cool, but doesn't integrate with other Zope content and is tricky to configure.

   Other tracker products that I've seen for Zope are either abandoned or incomplete.

   So, that's why the search continues. Plone's CMF Collector seems like a nice solution though. Once they hit a stable 1.0 release (and I have time to set up a site), I really think that's the route I'm going to go.

   Anyways, it's tough to change business to suit one tool when so many tools never make it to a 1.0 release, or get abandoned. Maybe I'm too cynical. But I've been burned by these things in the past.

   Posted by: J.Shell on December 10, 2002 04:59 PM

2. Plone's Collector is just the old CMFCollector crap. CMFCollectorNG is a major rewrite of CMFCollector. And it offers more features than all other Zope trackers. The current release 0.10 does not mean that it is in an early stage. We have CMFCollectorNG
   in production since some weeks with about 50 persons using it. The only reason not to use it is that the UI is currently in German only.

   Posted by: Andreas Jung on December 13, 2002 07:51 AM

3. Guys, I *like* Zope, CMF and CMFCollectorNG. What I was mentioning was that I've friends and colleagues all trying to make their own tracker system (SQL, forms) instead of using existing free products like Zope.

   Posted by: Babu on December 13, 2002 02:07 PM