[pmwiki-users] Improving PITS

Petko Yotov 5ko at 5ko.fr
Wed Jul 8 10:38:14 CDT 2009


Hello,

In the last few weeks we've had discussions about how to report bugs and how 
to build consensus about new PmWiki features. I read less comments than what 
I expected (but we're in the middle of the summer etc.) and I'll be happy to 
read more opinions from the active community.

PITS, the PmWiki Issue Tracking System, was created years ago for discussions 
about the development. There are more than 1100 entries in PITS today.

I've been doing some cleanup in PITS this week to make it easier for us to 
overview, prioritize and deal with issue reports and feature requests. Please 
compare the two versions :
  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/PITS-old - this was PITS yesterday
  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/PITS     - this  is PITS now

The major changes are:
* added a Searchbox tuned for pages in the PITS group
* simple definition lists instead of one huge table
* use of styles/colors to better contrast what's important
* new compact priority averages  (for 4+ votes)
* fewer data (no need for "Version"; "Created" and "full priority list" appear
  in tooltip titles)
* default order/sort by category (bugs first) then by priority averages
* no column sorting, we'll deal with all bugs/requests as they come
* Inactive discussions (no edits for 180+ days) are automatically labeled and
  moved to a sub-page, instead of cluttering the main page.

I also manually replied and/or closed 60+ PITS entries, and now the homepage 
has become shorter more readable than the dinosaur we had before.

I was thinking, we could add a form at the bottom of every PITS entry to make 
it easier to post a new comment, but I realised that if it is too easy to 
post, we'll have to deal with a lot of spam (like we had to, in the PmForm 
website). So, for now, we can keep it to simple wiki pages.

I wish we could review/comment/action on entries that will be added, in less 
than 24-48 hours. And, deal with the existing clutter in small batches when 
we have time (fixes for confirmed bugs have priority, as always).

Now, all this can and should be further improved. So, please share your ideas, 
comments, questions etc.

Thanks,
Petko



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