I need the following plugins for Trac (if exist):
Diagrams: Gantt and other;
Export to MS Excel;
Dashboards: control panels, monitors
Some pointers in order of your request with some remarks, citations from the plugin description or own experience if applicable:
for Gantt diagrams there are actually multiple choices (in total absence of own experience roughly in order of likelihood of usability):
TracJsGanttPlugin by jsgantt, computed % completion, actively maintained
GanttCalendarPlugin - manually set % completion, month view for tickets, maintained
FlashGanttPlugin based on FusionCharts Free - just for milestones, not for tickets, seems unmaintained
SchedulingToolsPlugin, early beta, definitely unmaintained
GanttChartPlugin no dynamic, just YAML text block to Gantt markup processor, seems unmaintained
ExcelDownloadPlugin - using this myself: works great, there's even i18n support on the way
WhiteboardPlugin - not totally convinced here
More generally I recommend TracStatsPlugin to you for making a nice bundled view with navigation to sub-pages on topics (repo, ticket, wiki). It looks tidy and useful, and it has a responsive maintainer.
There is a great site called Trac Hacks. A quick search here will show you many different plugins for handling Visualizations. Here is a quick list of plugins that do visualizations.
As for an export to Excel, what are you trying to export? For Tickets and reports, at the bottom of each page, there is an option to export to a comma or tab delimited Text file. This can be opened in Excel. If that is not enough, here are three plugins that will export to Excel
ExcelDownloadPlugin
ExportImportXlsPlugin
ExcelReportPlugin
I hope this helps.
Josh
Related
is there a way to create a task/activity report (say a weekly report) off tasks managed with Mylyn? I've been using Rachota TimeTracker which allows me to create reports (in html format)
http://rachota.sourceforge.net/en/demo.html
I've just started using mylyn (our company uses Embarcadero JBuilder which is is based on Eclipse), but I don't see anywhere in the Eclipse or Embarcadero docs about reporting capabilities.
Is it possible? Is it possible to query activities worked on a prior week and report statistics out of it (management like reports, you know;) I'm sure it is, but I haven't been able to google it out.
Thanks.
You're in luck, Tasktop Pro (the supported version of Mylyn) has reporting. It allows you to:
View all task activity times for the previous day, week, and month
Manually adjust times as necessary to account for meetings and discussions
Submit your adjusted times, on tasks you select, to your task repository
Create reports in various formats
I'd recommend this short video which explains the reporting features in about 6 minutes.
David Shepherd
Tasktop Technologies
As you already know by now, the reporting functionality is included into commercial Tasktop product, which is developed by the same people who created Mylyn. So, obviously they are not interested to include some features into a free version. Now you have two options, either buy Tasktop, or develop your own extension for Mylyn. The task data is stored in reasonable simple xml file, so you not necessarily have to create an Eclipse plugin.
the reporting feature was stripped from the project when it used to be called mylar, in 2007, and since the project went commercial never came back to the open source mylyn for obvious reasons..
I found this simple perl script which outputs a pretty basic text only report, good enough for me.
http://rachaelandtom.info/mylyn-report
No takers? Not surprised since I can't find anything on the subject. For what's worth, there is an experimental task/activity report available for Mylyn with the sandbox jar. However, I could not get mine to work as I'm tied up with a JBuilder installation behind a firewall (and I can't download anything on the corp network that is not pre-evaluated... it sucks, I know.)
I'm going to have to experiment with the mylyn sandox at home, but it would be great if someone knows of an easier, more stable alternative.
I have to maintain a huge set of training material in forms of slides.
At a first glance, I've noticed there's no support for version control in OpenOffice OOImpress (but I might be wrong on this).
Which tool should I use to easily maintain my training material?
I thought about using LaTeX + Beamer so that I can easily put under version control the source code for the slides, but also non technical people should be able to update the material and I would prefer not to force them to learn LaTeX.
My preferred way of writing presentations is now using a Trac wiki with the S5 plugin.
S5 is a slideshow format that turns HTML+CSS+JS into a slideshow you can run in your browser. You can see an example slideshow here.
Instead of writing the S5 HTML by hand, I use Trac's S5 plugin to convert wiki syntax (similar to mediawiki syntax) to an S5 presentation. So a wiki page like this:
[[S5(theme=yatil)]]
= My presentation =
'''November 18 2009'''
* Steven Kryskalla
* skryskalla#gmail.com
* http://lost-theory.org
== Intro ==
* Topic 1
* Topic 2
* etc.
== How to X ==
First, install and configure...
{{{
#!python
#this turns into syntax highlighted code
}}}
== Resources ==
* http://www.example.com/
Turns into a slideshow with 4 slides. The == Headings == start a new slide, and the body of each slide can be text, syntax highlighted code, bulleted lists, numbered lists, images, tables, etc.
The wiki has built in version control so you can diff, revert changes, etc.
It probably wouldn't be that difficult to re-use the wiki formatter and S5 code to create a command line program that turned a text file into a presentation. That would allow you to keep the slide in your own version control system (svn, hg, etc.).
I sounds like you're looking for a Digital Asset Management System. You could try something like SVN with one of its GUI tools, or get something more involved like Canto's Cumulus.
Cumulus is something our company has used in the past, we no longer have a need for the system so my knowledge on the different kinds of systems out there is pretty dated.
Why not simply put OOImpress documents under something like Subversion or Git and use TortoiseSVN to let end-users manage the version-control bit.
Any good CMS offers revision control as well. But in general, any source control system can version any file, diffs won't be easy to do, however, since these items are in xml, they won't diff well.
This is an old question, but because I have run across the same issue recently, I would like to share solutions I considered or used, in the hope it may be useful for the next person who runs across this question:
The simplest solution is to use Powerpoint or similar software online, converting LaTeX to images, and to use their built-in version control. Answers to this question detail how you can diff such versions.
You could use a Markdown-based solution. My eventual choice was AsciiDoctor because it's free, well-maintained, and does what I need. Madoko looks even better, and is more oriented towards LaTeX, but does not seem to be maintained. Both solutions are based on the reveal.js framework. There is also GitPitch which is a git-based Markdown solution, but its freemium model puts me off. Fusuma is another solution a Google-search suggested.
What is the best version control system to implement with PowerBuilder 11.5?
If you have examples of how you have did branching/trunk/tags that would be awesome. We have tried to wrap our heads around it a few times and always run into problems because we use shared libraries such as PFC/PFE in multiple applications.
Right now we are only using PBNative, and it sucks.
The Agent SVN is a MS-SCCI Subversion plug-in works with PowerBuilder.
Here is a link that describes how to setup Agent SVN to work with PowerBuilder and Subversion.
We currently use Perforce and it's P4SCC plugin, which works very well. In fact, I'm sure I read somewhere that the guys at Sybase who write PowerBuilder, actually use Perforce themselves.
So, to be fair, let's start out by saying that while you're asking about version control, PBNative is source control. If you compare something that is intended to have more features than just keep two developers from editing the same piece of source, then yes, PBNative will suck. The Madone SL may be an incredible bicycle, but if you're trying to take a couple of laps around an Indy track, it will suck.
"Best" is a pretty subjective word. There are lots of features available in version control and configuration management tools. You can get tons of features, but you'll pay through the nose. StarTeam has some nice features like being able to trace a client change request or bug report all the way through to the changed code, and being able to link in a customized diff tool (which is particularly useful in PB). Then again, if cost is your key criteria rather than features, there are lots of free options that will get the job done. As long as the tool supports the Microsoft SCC interface, you should be OK.
There is a relatively active NNTP newsgroup that focuses on source control with PowerBuilder, which you can also access via the web. You can probably find some already-posted opinions there.
Many years ago I used Starteam to control PB applications. PowerBuilder needless to say is an outdated bear, and it has to export each and every object from its "libraries" into source control.
Currently our legacy PB apps have its libraries saved whole into Subversion, without any support for diff's etc.
We use Visual SourceSafe. We don't use PFC, but we do have libraries that are shared among several projects. Till now, each project was developed separately from the others, and so the shared libraries were duplicated. To have them synchronized, they were all shared at the VSS level. Lately we've reorganized our sources so all projects are near each other, and there's only one instance of the shared libraries.
VSS is definitively not the best source control system, to say the least, but it integrates into PB without the need of any bridges. PB has an inherent problem working with source control, so it probably won't make a very difference working with one instead of the other (at least from the PB point of view).
Now, on a personal note, I'd like to say PB 11.5 is a piece of sh*t. It constantly crashes, full of unbelievable UI nuisance and just brings productivity to its knees. It's probably the worst IDE ever created. Stay away if possible.
FYI: The new PB12 (PB.NET) will integrate with SCC systems so you can easily choose which source control system that you want to use. Since we basically have dropped PBLs (they are now directories) files can be checked in/out individually - even with a plain vanilla editor since files are now normal (unicode) text files.
StarTeam integrates so beautifully with the PB IDE. I used that combination at my previous company (PB9 and ST5.x) for several years. You should be managing your code at the object level - don't log the entire PBL into ST...
If you're having problems with that setup, hit me up offline. phoran at sybase dot com.
We use Merant Version Manager for older projects and TFS for newer work. The only issue we have is that TFS does not support keyword expansion and changing the 'read the flowerbox comments' attitude people have. Some folks are nervous about losing the inline versioning history.
We use StarTeam and have been very pleased with it. It combines bug tracking with version control. Unfortunately though we don't store our files on the object level. We just store the PBL files directly in source control. Anything that supports the SCC interface theoretically should work correctly in PowerBuilder.
PB9: We used PVCS but had stability problems with pbl corruption and also problems co-existing with later versions of Crystal Reports (dll conflict) so now we use PB9 with Dynamsoft's Source Anywhere Standalone. This system is more primitive; it is missing the more advanced features for promotion levels and for pulling out an older milestone version of all objects to make a patch build.
What we are looking for now is something which will allow more advanced "change management", to support promotion levels at the change level (rather than at the object level). Would it be better to use perforce, starteam, or (harvest change manager + HarPB), or something else? Any advice on these combinations would be greatly appreciated.
You can always use Plastic SCM with PowerBuilder through SCC. Plastic is pretty advanced in terms of graphics, tools, replica and so on, so it's always a good choice to keep in mind.
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In particular, I need a more full fledged version of Trac to support robust project management, and task tracking. I went through the plugins and literally found over 50 that looked promising.
My question is to the admins/users of Trac: which ones are indespensible for making Trac feature complete and which ones should be avoided (e.g. stability issues)?
Lots of Trac plugins look promising. Unfortunately only a handful really delivers and even then some of them are not properly supported or maintained. They also tend to conflict sometimes.
I will not recommend anything for project management specifically but these are the ones which made our live so much easier:
TagsPlugin - the most useful one, adds tags support
BreadCrumbsNav - show previously visited pages, saves lots of time
ShowPath - show the breadcrumbs path, useful if you have your pages named hierarchically
CaseInsensitiveWiki - allows entering case-insensitive URLS
Stratistics - show Wiki/SVN statistics
WikiRename - allows page renaming (does not work well with the Tags)
0.10
WebAdmin - pre-installed in 0.11 but before you need to get it separately
My Favorites:
General:
Better editor WYSIWYG: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TracWysiwygPlugin
TicketCalendar Macro: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/WikiTicketCalendarMacro
AccountManager: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/AccountManagerPlugin
Scrum
- Agilo: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/AgiloForScrumPlugin
This is the place to watch http://trac-hacks.org/
Besides those already mentioned here, I also found the following necessary:
Announcer - very flexible notification scheme
AutocompleteUsers - handy while typing (existent) user name
AutoLinks - automatically make words not conforming to wiki naming rule but matches existent page name a link
CustomFieldAdmin - make manage custom fields easier
Redirect - handy if you constantly need to make short-hand name wiki pages (like HTML redirects to HyperText .....)
TicketDelete - make deleting, if at all needed, easier
WikiRename - must-have for wiki refactoring
Below are good-to-have:
S5 - directly render wiki pages as slideshow in S5 format, could be really useful for using Trac as the source for presentation
FullBlog - add blogging support to Trac
Vote - cool add-on feature for big team
TracWikiToPdf - transform wiki page to pdf dynamically (however the effect might be all that satisfying)
TimingAndEstimation - neat for tracking time and/or estimation
I really like the BatchModifyPlugin that makes it easy to change more than one ticket at the time.
MasterTicketsPlugin is quite useful for ticket dependncies.
I would recommend against Bitten for CI (Continuous Integration) (see Martin Fowler on the subject) although I am using it.
The task force behind Bitten doesn't seem strong enough to process the remaining tasks. Simply look at the age and the number of posts in Bitten tickets
I don't admin our Trac, and I don't know all the plugins we use. But I co-developed a GUI we use to navigate the tickets and to track time spent on specific ones. It uses the xmlrpc plugin to query ticket information and to write some information back. Extending Trac is really easy this way.
my must-have list of plugins:
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/AccountManagerPlugin
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/GitPlugin
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TagsPlugin
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/BatchModifyPlugin
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TicketDeletePlugin
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/XmlRpcPlugin
some may be part of trac since 0.12
and a script:
https://subtrac.sara.nl/oss/email2trac
Apache Bloodhound is a collection of plugins bundled with Trac. It includes some of the individual plugins suggested in earlier answers, like the AccountManagerPlugin.
The major plugins developed as part of Bloodhound are a very robust Multi Product implementation, full text search (based on Whoosh) with better navigation.
Ticket relations have also just been added.
Bloodhound keeps integrating newly released trac versions quickly, and all plugins interoperate as expected because they're purposefully bundled. It's also still compatible with most trac-hacks.
What plugins you will consider must-have depends heavily on your use case.
Must-have plugins if you need more power in creating advanced wiki pages:
GraphvizPlugin
WikiExtrasPlugin
Must-have plugins if you like IDE-style auto-completion and indentation features in the text editor:
TextareaKeyBindingsPlugin
WikiAutoCompletePlugin
Must-have plugins if you use many Mercurial repositories:
MercurialPlugin
HgDirManagerPlugin
Must-have plugins if you ...
... want to archive emails: MailArchivePlugin
... want to track time spent on tasks: TimeTrackingPlugin
... want to plan your week: WeekPlanPlugin
... want to drag cards between stacks: CardsPlugin
...
But if you don't have these use cases, you will not find the plugins valuable.
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The people writing the user manual are not necessarily programmers, and they need a visual editor. A major issue is the internal format of the authoring tool; it should be readable text/html, so it's easy to compare versions of individual pages checked into version control.
DocBook
(source: docbook.org)
Microsoft HTML Help Workshop can be used to create good quality professional CHM help files. All you need is a bunch of HTML files. The tool "compiles" all these and bundles into a single Help file.
The HTML files can be generated using Microsoft Word/Frontpage or even Dreamweaver. You might want to consider source controlling these HTML files.
Latex. Lyx provides WYSIWYM for writing latex files.
At my old job they used a tool by madcap software called flare.
It seemed to work really well.
There are other professional products which allow help file writing and they have support of "context ID" which makes context sensitive help possible. Doc To Help and RoboHelp are these type of products.
A good combination to consider is Subversion, DocBook and Publican.
Version control = Subversion
Content Authoring = DocBook
Publishing = Publican
Optional WYSIWYG = Serna
At the moment, this is one of the toolchains in use by the world's largest provider of open source solutions, and the name behind much of the world's use of Linux-based operation systems in the enterprise market. Most (and close to all) of Red Hat's official documentation is created in such a manner. Same goes for Fedora.
The major "pro" here is that these are freely available tools, with a strong overlap in the market of technical writers. All of which will be able to (but might not want to) write in XML, and picking up DocBook is like picking up HTML in the 90's. Subversion is a very common version control tool, that like DocBook is relatively easy to implement and use. Publican is a great publishing tool that can take DocBook XML, and publish it to PDF, HTML, HTML-single, etc. Obviously your writers can use a WYSIWYG like Serna, but I use snippets in Geany (on Fedora) or TextMate (on OS X) personally.
The major "con" is the perception of technicality. Your writers might want WYSIWYG (and can have it), and depending on your documentation needs, this might be what you end up using. As you would know, there's a market out there for "Technical Writers" who specialize in fixing Microsoft Word styles (and markup), so the arguments for separating "authoring" from "publishing" are based on proven but distinct use cases for organizations that require documentation to be held up to the same standards of the engineering/programming/source production.
Some of the extreme advice you will get comes from people and companies that have been exposed to the value of XML documentation, and especially those in the realms of DITA, where certain multi-nationals have a reputation for acquisitions that are influenced by the format and availability of the product knowledge. there are also the arguments that locking your documentation into a "sticky" or closed format doesn't help the future maintenance requirements. This is where the open source options gain support on a corporate level. Plus, obviously, it's free.
You can use Subversion and MGTEK Help Producer. Help Producer makes help files from Word documents. TortoiseSVN comes with scripts to compare different revisions of Word documents, in Word itself (Word has a version compare tool).
Your users are going to want a visual diff tool that resembles the one they are editing in. If they are just slightly not-technical, DocBook or Latex aren't going to work (I've tried giving my users both, and I even tried Epic Editor as a DocBook editor which is very expensive but didn't work out very well after all). Sticking to something they know (Word) will prevent you many headaches.
I was very reluctant to go this route at first too, because I wanted a solution that was more 'technically perfect', but I realized over time that having happy and productive users was more important. Just saying that I know where you're coming from, but try the Word route - it works much better in practice than all the 'pure' text-based solutions that are out there. Regular users don't like markup based editing.
If you're using Visual Studio, take a look at SandCastle - http://www.codeplex.com/Sandcastle.
There's also a couple of tools that help you build sandcastle files, try searching "sandcastle" on codeplex. One of them is SandCastle Help File Builder (http://www.codeplex.com/SHFB), but I've never used it so I don't know if non-technical users will be happy with that.
Mapcap Flare is the best commercial tool around. Written by the ex-developers of Robodoc
I created a documentation system called Mandown (Markdown/Html/Javascript/file-based relatively linked documents for portability) which would easily go under version control. The visual editor part you would have to figure out separately - I sometimes use HTML-Kit which at least has a preview feature.
See What is the best way to store software documentation?
Here's another tool to check out: Xilize
We are using APT. It integrates well with the CI (standard build artifact) and is more alive than for instance word document. It is also possible to generate PDFs and other formats when needed.