Victor Boctor's Blog

Mantis 1.0.8 is a maintenance release for the 1.0.x stable releases branch. This release was mainly focused on fixing an application error that caused users to sometimes get a blank screen and some minor fixes that were requested by packagers for Linux distributions. It is a recommended updated for all 1.0.x users.

MantisWAP provides phones and PDAs with easy access to Mantis Bug Tracker. This is a great asset for support staff and developers who need to access Mantis while on the go. MantisWAP can easily be integrated with existing Mantis installations without having to modify the existing Mantis code.

The Mantis Demo installation also has a MantisWAP Demo. You'll need to sign-up for the Mantis demo first to be able to access MantisWAP.

See changelog for more details about MantisWAP v0.6.

Mantis 1.1 is becoming a much bigger release than what I initially anticipated. It has about 80 features and fixes so far. In this post, I will outline the major ones in comparison to Mantis 1.0.3 release.

- Wiki Integration (#7075): This involves integration with a Wiki where issues, projects, project versions, and users have Wiki pages. Obviously these Wiki pages can link to other Wiki pages and so on. It will be possible for Mantis users to integrate it with their favourite Wiki engine. There is a prototype of this feature on our official bug tracker which uses DokuWiki. Click the "Wiki" link next to "Send a Reminder" to see a sample issue Wiki page and find more information about this feature.

- Generic Configuration Page (#6972, #6973): A generic page is now available to preview all configurations that are stored in the database. Such configurations can be associated with all users/all projects, all users/specific project, specific user/all projects, or specific user/specific project. This screen also provides the ability to add/delete such configuration entries via Mantis web interface (i.e. more control on the scope of the configuration and no need to have access to config_inc.php). Some configuration options are still limited to the configuration file for security reasons.

- Selection of fields for View Issues, Print Issues and CSV Export via Configuration (#6319, #7110, #7111): In previous versions this was doable via using custom functions. This was a very flexible, but complicated process. In Mantis 1.1, this will be doable simply via the configuration, and with the new configuration web interface and simplification of having user and project specific configurations, this will be a great feature for users to choose the fields to be included and their order for each of the three output pages. It is still possible to use the custom functions approach for more advanced scenarios. Note that users can select native as well as custom fields.

- Authenticated RSS Feeds (#4213, #6757, #4641, #6987): There are three new features for RSS syndication, these are: ability to turn it OFF, ability to authenticate users accessing the RSS feed and hence removal of the limitations of accessing public projects and requiring anonymous access to be enabled, also added RSS feeds for ALL PROJECTS and specific projects that can be accessed from the View Issues page.

- Project Page (#6824) - A project page (project_page.php) is added that can be used to hyper-link to a specific project. At the moment this page re-directs to the View Issues page with the project selected, however in the future it will provide information about the project.

- Limit width/height of Image Previews (#6252) - It is now possible to configure the maximum width and height of an image preview. This is useful for keeping the issue readable when users attach big screenshots. Note that the aspect ratio of the image is maintained.

- Ability to remove fields like Severity and Reproducibility (#6488) - It is now possible to configure the default value for a non-mandatory fields and remove them from the report and update forms. This is a very useful feature for those who use Mantis for managing non-software related issues.

- Screenshots for Mantis (#7053) - This is not really a Mantis feature, but a plug-in was developed for the free Cropper screen capture tool to simplify the process of taking a screen shot, cropping it, compressing it and attaching it to a Mantis issue. This tool is for Windows users and requires .NET 1.1 framework to be installed.

- 2 new languages: Localisations for Bulgarian and Catalan languages were added.

There will probably be a preview release soon. I would love to get some feedback on the features above in time to do any necessary tweaks before the final 1.1 release.

Are you using TaskVision as a bugtracker or a task manager and would like to migrate to Mantis? If so, here is a tool to help.

I've got the question about how to setup anonymous access several times. Following are the steps:

• Create an account and call it anonymous (or whatever else you like, e.g. guest).
• Mark the account as protected.
• Assign the appropriate access to this account (i.e. the projects that it should have access to, and with the appropriate access levels).
• Set the following configuration options in config_inc.php
  # --- anonymous login -----------
$g_allow_anonymous_login = ON;
$g_anonymous_account = 'anonymous';