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Hi everyone, I’m building a bug tracker and was hoping somebody here could give me some advice on some of the structure. This is loosely based on Lisa’s bug tracker tutorial but I’ve had to add several new features to customize it for our needs.

It’s going to be a central defect tracking tool for all of our brands, which will be further divided into projects. Each brand can have multiple projects at any given time.

I currently have it set up so that each brand gets its own weblog. I keep all the template files in one template group and duplicate the group each time I need to set up a new brand.

But I need to be able to divide each brand into different projects and therein lies the problem.

I was thinking of assigning each entry to a specific custom field, which will be the name of a project. And then filtering by custom field to show all entries for that specific project. The problem with this approach is that I don’t know if I can set up a drop down menu that gives users a choice of filtering by custom field.

The other approach I was thinking of was of dividing each project into separate weblogs, regardless of brand. But then I thought that would be a lot of work every time I needed a new project—to have to go and recreate a template group and edit all the values would be time-consuming. The other way seems infinitely more manageable.

What do you guys think? Any advice? I’m pretty new to EE but I think I have a good grasp of the basics. I hope anyway.

Thanks!

Just curious…

Why use EE to build a bug tracker? Are there not plenty of open source or commercial applications that already do that?

As far as commercial applications go, yes, there are hundreds of them. Most are very expensive and/or do a lot more than we need them to. I’ve used bugzilla in the past but my manager did not like it. So here we are using EE.

I wonder what those commercial packages cost vs. the hourly cost of developing (re-inventing the wheel) something less featured, less capable in EE?

😉

Considering I’m doing this when I have free time at work, it isn’t costing my company anything. But I see your point. I lead the QA department and while I like building sites as a hobby, there are better things i could be doing with my time. But my company refuses to pay for one of the commercial systems so this is what I’m doing.

We can debate the merits of using EE as a bug tracker all you want, but how about you offer some actual advice on my problem first?

We can debate the merits of using EE as a bug tracker all you want, but how about you offer some actual advice on my problem first?

I appreciate the situation you’re in. Been there, done that, not fun.

As to advice to use EE, which is a commercial content management system, as a substitute for a bug tracking system, I’ll defer that to my stack of efforts of diminishing returns. I suppose a Lexus could be used to haul lumber, too…

Thanks for that.