Victor Boctor's Blog

In the last couple of days, I have been testing Mantis 1.0.0rc1. It is coming along really well and it is a release that is truly feature packed!! I will probably dedicate separate posts for providing detailed information on some of these features. Some of the highlights of this release include:

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- Support database configs: Support for storing configuration in the database is now implemented. The plan is to move the configuration gradually. The code now looks up the configs in the database as well as config_defaults_inc.php and config_inc.php. Configurations in the database can be global or specific to a user, a project, or a user/project. Workflow thresholds, Workflow transitions, and email notifications are now configured via web pages and are stored in the database. Also these configurations are project specific.

- Permissions Report: Who can do what was always a common question, and hence this report now includes a list of all possible actions and the access levels that can do them. It also shows the different events and who will get notified.

- Thresholds: Access level thresholds can now be set to an array of access levels, rather than just a threshold. For example, you can allow reporters, managers and administrators to add notes without allowing developers and managers.

- Sub-projects: You can now have a sub-project that acts as a component that is included as part of several projects. Issues relating to these sub-project will appear as part of their parent projects.

- Sticky Issues: Mark issues as sticky and hence they will always show up at the top in the View Issues page. Sticky issues will only be visible if they match the active filter criteria.

- Filter By Relationship: Ability to filter on issues that have a specific relationship to a specific issue.

- Global Profiles: Support for global profiles, which are machine profiles that are common to all Mantis users. This is in addition to the private profiles that each user defines.

- Primary/Secondary sort: Ability to provide a primary and secondary sorting fields and sort orders (ascending / descending). These fields and their sort order are saved as part of filters.

- Filtering on blank values: Ability to filter on issues that have custom fields with a value that is empty or not set.

- Selecting columns to view: Ability to select the columns to view in the View Issues page and the print issues page. This can be done using custom functions.

- Custom fields with dynamic possible values: Ability to define enumeration custom fields with dynamic possible values. So rather than setting the possible values to 'CatA|CatB|CatC' you can now set it to "=categories" which will automatically use all categories of the current project as possible values. Users can define their own "=xxx" by implementing custom functions. The standard ones are "versions", "released_versions", "future_versions", and "categories".

Feel free to ask questions relating to the above features, based on the questions, I will decide which features I should explain in more details.