MantisBT: TagColumn

TagColumn

Version 1.0
Copyright 2010, Brian Enigma <brian@netninja.com>, https://netninja.com
Licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Theory

When used correctly, adding tags to Mantis issues can be a powerful feature. Unfortunately, the current tag implementation feels more like an
afterthought rather than a completely baked-in feature. This is especially true on the View Issues page, where tags are completely hidden from the
user. This plugin attempts to fix this by adding a Tags column.

Usage

After installation (see below), users can add the “Tags” column to their
View Issues screen by following these steps.

  1. Go to My Account -> Manage Columns.
  2. Add the “tagcolumn_tags” column to your View Issues Columns.

An administrator can perform similar steps, but under Manage -> Manage Configuration -> Manage Columns to add this column for all users.

Requirements

Mantis 1.2.0 or greater is required.

Note that this version of the plugin does not support the column data
caching API. This means that there could be some performance penalties
when run on high-traffic sites.

Installation

Installation is simple and involves creating a plugin folder and copying the plugin’s PHP file into the folder.  You then activate it from within Mantis.

  1. Create a folder under your mantis plugins folder named TagColumn.  For instance, if you have Mantis installed at /var/www/mantisbt, then you would create /var/www/mantisbt/plugins/TagColumn.
  2. Copy TagColumn.php into this folder.
  3. Log in to Mantis as an administrator.
  4. Go to Manage -> Manage Plugins and click “Install” next to TagColumn.

Downloading/Version History

The original v1.0 release was the last one I worked on. It has been about 5 years since I last used Mantis. This means I have little interest in updating and maintaining new releases. I have since moved the code to a GitHub repository. As individuals submit features and bugfixes, I merge them with the repository. You can find the latest, greatest code there.

11 thoughts on “MantisBT: TagColumn”

    1. Oops, sorry — I should have replied to this earlier. Exporting the tag column never really occurred to me. I don’t think I’ve once used Mantis’ export feature. I’ll look into it, but I have a number of projects I’m juggling that are a bit higher priority (and a bit higher interest level).

  1. Hi there. What do you mean by a “Tag” in the above description? Do you mean, like, resolved, new etc or what? I like your concept and appreciate that you’ve made this wonderful free plugin, but for some reason my mind is not making the connection. LOL!

    1. “Tag” is an arbitrary text string you can attach to a bug (actually, you can attach multiple to an issue). You can search and view by tag. In our installation, we used it for a number of different things. “release_notes” meant we had to put something in the release notes about the issue. “off_by_one” was a common tag we used because there was a lot of zero-based code talking to one-based code. There was another one for “rate_matching” because that was another problematic set of algorithms. Many of these tags could be searched and used as the basis for better test scripts and unit tests and such.

      Overall, you can think of tags as free-form categories & an issue can belong to more than one.

    1. At one point, I tried to go down the path of sorting by tags, but the framework under which the plugin runs really wasn’t set up for that — not to mention how to deal with having multiple tags on an issue. I don’t know if the framework has since changed (it’s been about two years since I last checked, and actually no longer use Mantis as an issue tracking system).

  2. Hi, I try this plugin and I have an issues.

    In view issues page, the issues are displayed as expected but, the second line is all grey.
    I use Mantis 1.2.5
    Are there a fix anywhere ?
    ty

    G__

    1. I no longer use Mantis as a bug tracking system, so do not have an easy way to develop or test — and more importantly don’t have the incentive anymore to continue development. If a developer would like to locate and resolve the problem, I’d be more than happy to accept a patch.

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