Tracks

I’ve got a couple of announcements to make:

1. I’m going to move from comment moderation on the Tracks site, to requiring membership to make comments. I’m hoping that this will be more effective in reducing spam, and will require less intervention from me as a moderator. To facilitate this, I’ve added a login form to the top of every page. The membership is the same as for the forum and wiki, so if you have already signed up for either of those, just sign in with your username and password. If you have uploaded an avatar, it should also show that avatar against your name if you make a comment. I’m also creating a bug tracker within the Tracks website, so you will also be able to use the same credentials to create tickets and comment on tickets that others have created.
2. I’ve got to move the entire Tracks site (and my own blog) to a new server over Christmas. In the process, I’ll have to disable the current site, Trac, forum and mailing list for a short while so that I don’t lose any data in the move. I’ll try to make that period as short as possible, but it depends on the process going smoothly! So if you see a notice that the site is down over the next few days, don’t be surprised. When it is finished, we should get faster page loading and experience much greater stability.
3. When this process is all over, Tracks will get its own, shiny new domain at long last: http://www.getontracks.org/ I’ll redirect the old site to the new one, but it would be a good idea to update your bookmarks when the process is finished too.

Wish me luck! It’s a bit of a complex process, and I’m fairly scared of messing things up!

Some quick updates on the migration progress:

When I emailed before, I mentioned that I was planning to create a custom ticket setup on the Tracks home site, to replace Trac. I managed to do that, but importing the previous tickets turned out to be beyond me because of the complexity of the ExpressionEngine database architecture. I spent quite a bit of time trying to fix it, before discovering an online system, which—at the very least—should be a very capable temporary system to tide us over the migration period.

So I’ve imported all the existing tickets and milestones to Assembla.

http://www.assembla.com/spaces/tracks-tickets/tickets

This is a hosted system, which allows free public projects and allows anyone to sign up to create tickets and edit the wiki. It doesn’t have to advantage of the system that I was planning of allowing just one signup for our forum, wiki and tickets, but it does have a number of other advantages, including a very nice email notification system, where you have fine control over how you receive notifications, and you can even send emails to create or update tickets. There is also integration with GitHub, so commits from GitHub are shown on the Stream (equivalent to the Trac Timeline) and text such as ‘Fixes #800’ in the commit message will automatically mark ticket 800 as fixed.

I’ve had a bit of a look around Assembla and I’m impressed with the features offered, but I’ll be guided by the rest of you as to whether you want to keep it as a permanent solution. I know that some people are uncomfortable about having open source projects hosted by third parties, but they provide a way to export your data easily, and since the source is now hosted externally, it makes sense to me. Hosting Trac was always the biggest headache for me, so it will be quite a weight off my mind, and it’s much easier to adminstrate new users. I can also set it so that anyone (even if not logged in) can create and comment on tickets if people don’t want to create a login just to do that.

Can some of you take a quick look over the next few days and see what you think? I’m visiting family for the next couple of days, but when I return, I’ll start the migration process and close down the old Trac instance. For now, if you could add new tickets to Assembla, rather than Trac, it would be a big help.