IssueTrackerProduct

One of the people on the issuetracker mailinglist, Greg Baker, has chipped in a very interesting answer on the topic of Plone integration and customization. Greg has managed to patch up his issuetracker not only to change the look & feel but also to add lots of alien fields to go with the issues.

"I am using issue tracker on top of plone. Although it does not use the plone skins, it works with the plone userbase. I have no users defined in issuetracker, so the users must log in through plone."

"I used checkoutabletemplates to customize issuetracker to look similar to our plone site. It's not perfect but nobody seems to mind."

Not only has Greg revamped the appearance of his issuetracker, he has used the advice of monkey patching to change the functionality. Since he expects every issue to be entered by students of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, with every issue he wants to track their student number, student name, student MAC etc. This might sound like a bore for the students to enter every time they need to raise an issue about a fault of some kind but Greg has solved that too. All the student needs to do is to enter her student number first of all and through another external database all these fields are filled in automatically.

All the alien fields that Greg has managed to squeeze in are also searchable and changeable even after the issue has been entered.

Because this patch is external to the source code of the IssueTrackerProduct, Greg will be able to separate his code from the general code so when a new version is released his changes will continue to work even after an upgrade.

Keep up the good work Greg!