Mantis Bug Tracker Blog

This is the first dev release for Mantis 1.2.x series. The highlights of this version include:

1. New manual (in Docbook format) - A lot of work has been done into putting together a consolidated up to date documentation. There is more to be done, but I believe we are heading in the right direction. We’ve chosen to go with Docbook XML as the format for the source of the documentation. This can be compiled into several formats including PDF (hosted on scribd, will try to update this regularly), single page HTML, multiple page HTML, etc. So far we have two manuals: administrators guide and developers guide. Eventually the administrators guide may be split into administrators guide and users guide.
2. Plugins support - This is probably the most valuable addition in the 1.2.x release. In the past it was possible to extend Mantis via the use of custom functions. However, the places where this was available was limited and it wasn’t aiming for development of full plugins, but rather was designed to just tweak certain behavior. With the introduction of plugins, the Mantis community and the developers will be able to add non-core behavior to Mantis, use it, and share it with others. The plugins APIs and events will mature over time and will offer more integration point, however, we will do our best in order to avoid breaking changes, specially with incremental releases. For a sample plugin, see the Twitter clone add-in that is installed on the official bug tracker, we would like to hear from you there
3. Refactoring Wiki drivers into plugins and addition of WikkaWiki and TWiki.
4. Global categories - Users can now define a set of categories that are shared across all projects.
5. Freemind support (in browser / export) - This is similar to the relationship diagrams are already available in Mantis. However, the Freemind features comes with a built in Flash viewer (hence, easier to get up and running), includes details about the issues, relationships, attachments, statuses, links, etc. It is also possible to export a Freemind file.
6. This releases also includes major improvement in the export code and the ability to define columns to include in View Issues, Print Issues, CSV, and Excel export via the GUI.
7. And sixty more features, enhancements and fixes.

Note that this release only supports PHP 5.1 and above (see “Dropping PHP 4.x Support“). Although our bug tracker is now running on this release, we don’t recommend using this release in production environments.

The digests for the mantis-1.2.0a1.tar.gz file are:

• MD5 HASH: c9406018df266a6242f17c5c92fab31e
• SHA1 HASH: 8e29825f94d72b7fbe85aadc1b00f814735b1c81

Or for the mantis-1.2.0a1.zip:

• MD5 HASH: bab4f6545a618e834c50edb2906ce971
• SHA1 HASH: f93daed7c85a6a86c414d817b9bdb8d1498efb25

Following are some Mantis related services:

• Mantis Download Page
• Mantis Blog - The blog is used for news and updates relating to Mantis. The old news feature on the home page will be phased out and replaced by the blog. Users are encouraged to subscribe to the blog RSS feed.
• Mantis Hosting - Looking for Mantis hosting + someone to do the installation for you? Checkout our hosting page.
• Mantis Twitter - Twitter will is used for keeping Mantis users (followers of Mantis twitter) updated with all issues that are resolved in the bug tracker and manual updates that are added relating to releases, etc. If you have a Twitter account, it is recommend that you follow “mantisbt” Twitter account.
• Mantis IRC Chat - Use the IRC chat page to chat with Mantis developers / users.
• MantisWAP: Access Mantis from your cell phone / PDA.
• MantisConnect: Access Mantis via Webservice from Java, .NET, Cocoa, and others (the webservice is now included out-of-the-box with 1.1.0a4, however, the client libraries will remain hosted by MantisConnect project):
• Forums: Mantis support forums. Please use the forums so that you can get more prompt responses and others can benefit and contribute. Please do not use “Contact Us” page for support.
• Wiki: Documentation, Requirements, How-To Guides, etc.
• Bug Tracker: Official Bug Tracker to report Mantis Bugs and Feature requests.
• Mantis Demo: A demo instance (running Mantis 1.1.x)

This is a maintenance release for the 1.1.x branch.  It includes a fix for PHP 4 support (#8681 stripos), several fixes for SOAP API, a security fix, and other minor bug fixes.

For Mantis instances that use non-latin characterset, there is no automated upgrade path for data already in the database. Hence, this wiki page guides you through the upgrade process. Please backup before you attempt to upgrade. It is also recommended to test the upgrade process on a backup instance rather than the live one.

Note: As per our previous post about “Dropping PHP 4.x Support“, it is important to note that Mantis 1.1.x release / maintenance releases will be the last Mantis release with PHP 4.x support.

The digests for the mantis-1.1.1.tar.gz file are:

• MD5 HASH: 7e646be79def5bb32b74b1a246caf766
• SHA1 HASH: 18e6ff41288f55a20f05e86a2791b01658213b4

Following are some Mantis related services:

• Mantis Download Page
• Mantis Blog - The blog is used for news and updates relating to Mantis. The old news feature on the home page will be phased out and replaced by the blog. Users are encouraged to subscribe to the blog RSS feed.
• Mantis Twitter - Twitter will is used for keeping Mantis users (followers of Mantis twitter) updated with all issues that are resolved in the bug tracker and manual updates that are added relating to releases, etc. If you have a Twitter account, it is recommend that you follow “mantisbt” Twitter account.
• MantisWAP: Access Mantis from your cell phone / PDA.
• MantisConnect: Access Mantis via Webservice from Java, .NET, Cocoa, and others (the webservice is now included out-of-the-box with 1.1.0a4, however, the client libraries will remain hosted by MantisConnect project):
• Forums: Mantis support forums. Please use the forums so that you can get more prompt responses and others can benefit and contribute. Please do not use “Contact Us” page for support.
• Wiki: Documentation, Requirements, How-To Guides, etc.
• Bug Tracker: Official Bug Tracker to report Mantis Bugs and Feature requests.
• Mantis Demo: A demo instance
• Mantis Manual

After 4 alpha releases, 3 release candidates and over 400 features and bug fixes, Mantis 1.1.0 gold is finally released. The highlights of the Mantis 1.1.0 release include:

1. Inclusion of MantisConnect (SOAP API) out of the box
2. Wiki integration (dokuwiki, mediawiki, xwiki),
3. Email queuing,
4. Gravatar integration,
5. DB2 support,
6. Tagging,
7. Filtering perma links,
8. Time tracking,
9. Twitter integration,
10. UTF8 support,
11. Generic configuration page,
12. Show last visited issues,
13. XHTML compliance,
14. Authenticated RSS,

For Mantis instances that use non-latin characterset, there is no automated upgrade path for data already in the database. Hence, this wiki page guides you through the upgrade process. Please backup before you attempt to upgrade. It is also recommended to test the upgrade process on a backup instance rather than the live one.

Note: As per our previous post about “Dropping PHP 4.x Support“, it is important to note that Mantis 1.1.x release / maintenance releases will be the last Mantis release with PHP 4.x support.  See bug #8681 for a fix of a PHP 4 compatibility issue with Mantis 1.1.0 release.

Following are some Mantis related services:

• Mantis Download Page
• Mantis Blog - The blog is used for news and updates relating to Mantis. The old news feature on the home page will be phased out and replaced by the blog. Users are encouraged to subscribe to the blog RSS feed.
• Mantis Twitter - Twitter will is used for keeping Mantis users (followers of Mantis twitter) updated with all issues that are resolved in the bug tracker and manual updates that are added relating to releases, etc. If you have a Twitter account, it is recommend that you follow “mantisbt” Twitter account.
• MantisWAP: Access Mantis from your cell phone / PDA.
• MantisConnect: Access Mantis via Webservice from Java, .NET, Cocoa, and others (the webservice is now included out-of-the-box with 1.1.0a4, however, the client libraries will remain hosted by MantisConnect project):
• Forums: Mantis support forums. Please use the forums so that you can get more prompt responses and others can benefit and contribute. Please do not use “Contact Us” page for support.
• Wiki: Documentation, Requirements, How-To Guides, etc.
• Bug Tracker: Official Bug Tracker to report Mantis Bugs and Feature requests.
• Mantis Demo: A demo instance
• Mantis Manual

This is the third release candidate for Mantis 1.1.0, we believe we are now very close to the final release. This release has several fixes relating to SOAP API, DB2, and others. All users running 1.1.0x releases are encouraged to update to this release.  This release can be downloaded from here.

For Mantis instances that use non-latin characterset, there is no automated upgrade path for data already in the database. Hence, this wiki page guides you through the upgrade process. Please backup before you attempt to upgrade. It is also recommended to test the upgrade process on a backup instance rather than the live one.

Following are some Mantis related services:

• Mantis Blog - The blog is used for news and updates relating to Mantis. The old news feature on the home page will be phased out and replaced by the blog. Users are encouraged to subscribe to the blog RSS feed.
• Mantis Twitter - Twitter will is used for keeping Mantis users (followers of Mantis twitter) updated with all issues that are resolved in the bug tracker and manual updates that are added relating to releases, etc. If you have a Twitter account, it is recommend that you follow “mantisbt” Twitter account.
• Mantis Job Board - There is now a Mantis Job Board that allows the Mantis Community to post and find job posts. The cost for posting a job is $30 $10 per month. The latest jobs also show up on Mantis web pages via the Job Board widget.
• MantisWAP: Access Mantis from your cell phone / PDA.
• MantisConnect: Access Mantis via Webservice from Java, .NET, Cocoa, and others (the webservice is now included out-of-the-box with 1.1.0a4, however, the client libraries will remain hosted by MantisConnect project):
• Forums: Mantis support forums. Please use the forums so that you can get more prompt responses and others can benefit and contribute. Please do not use “Contact Us” page for support.
• Wiki: Documentation, Requirements, How-To Guides, etc.
• Bug Tracker: Official Bug Tracker to report Mantis Bugs and Feature requests.
• Mantis Demo: A demo instance
• Mantis Manual

We have been thinking about the right time to drop support for PHP 4.x.x for a while now. The main drive is that in order for Mantis to use new PHP 5 features, we will have to drop PHP 4 support. We are thinking that it makes sense for 1.1.x to be the last Mantis release that supports PHP 4.x.x and starting with Mantis 1.2.0 have PHP 5 as the minimum requirement.

Following are some reasons why we think such move makes sense:

1. PHP 5 was released over 3 years ago.
2. php.net announced end-of-life for PHP 4 to be end of 2007. Following is a copy of the announcement:”[13-Jul-2007] Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued. The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.“
3. There are a lot of projects who have already upgraded their minimum requirement from PHP 4 to PHP 5, others have joined the gophp5 initiative to move to PHP 5 by February 2008. We are considering joining this initiative.
4. The time frame for releasing Mantis 1.2.x will be in 2008 and after the gophp5 initiative planned date (February 5, 2008). We are considering having 5.2.x as the minimum requirement which is inline with the gophp5 initiative.

We would like to get feedback from the Mantis users community relating to this change of minimum requirements. It is useful to hear feedback from users in the following categories:

• Users who are OK with the change.
• Users who are in favor of the change.
• Users who are against the change.

Note that Mantis already supports PHP 5, the main change here is to start using PHP 5 specific features like better object oriented features, exception handling, and many others.

This is the second release candidate for 1.1.0 release. It is recommended that all users with 1.1.0x releases upgrade to this version. This is mainly a bug fixes release.

For Mantis instances that use non-latin characterset, there is no automated upgrade path for data already in the database. Hence, this wiki page guides you through the upgrade process. Please backup before you attempt to upgrade. It is also recommended to test the upgrade process on a backup instance rather than the live one.

Following are some Mantis related services:

• Mantis Blog - The blog is used for news and updates relating to Mantis. The old news feature on the home page will be phased out and replaced by the blog. Users are encouraged to subscribe to the blog RSS feed.
• Mantis Twitter - Twitter will is used for keeping Mantis users (followers of Mantis twitter) updated with all issues that are resolved in the bug tracker and manual updates that are added relating to releases, etc. If you have a Twitter account, it is recommend that you follow “mantisbt” Twitter account.
• Mantis Job Board - There is now a Mantis Job Board that allows the Mantis Community to post and find job posts. The cost for posting a job is $30 $10 per month. The latest jobs also show up on Mantis web pages via the Job Board widget.
• MantisWAP: Access Mantis from your cell phone / PDA.
• MantisConnect: Access Mantis via Webservice from Java, .NET, Cocoa, and others (the webservice is now included out-of-the-box with 1.1.0a4, however, the client libraries will remain hosted by MantisConnect project):
• Forums: Mantis support forums. Please use the forums so that you can get more prompt responses and others can benefit and contribute. Please do not use “Contact Us” page for support.
• Wiki: Documentation, Requirements, How-To Guides, etc.
• Bug Tracker: Official Bug Tracker to report Mantis Bugs and Feature requests.
• Mantis Demo: A demo instance
• Mantis Manual

Good news for Mantis users with Windows client desktops.  A Cropper plugin is now available to allow you to easily take screenshots (for specified regions) and send them directly to an issue into Mantis.  This tool has a dependency on MantisConnect which is now shipped as part of Mantis 1.1.0x releases.  The tool can be download from here.

The options dialog is used to specify the URL to the MantisConnect webservice, the user name and password.

Following is the screenshot details dialog which allows the user to specify the issue the screenshot should be attached to.  It also allows the user to specify the name of the file that will be attached.  As the user types the issue id the subject of the issue will be fetched to provide the user with info about the issue confirming that the provided id is the correct one.  Users can also enter a note to be added along with the screenshot.  All screenshot are added in JPG format.

In Mantis 1.1.x we have added a feature to integrate with the gravatar, a global avatar service allowing users to define their avatar once and use it from any websites that support the service.  Although it was neat service, it was having some struggles with scalability.  It is great to see that Automattic (the company behind WordPress) has acquired gravatar.  According to the announcement, the service has already been migrated to WordPress servers and is already serving avatars three times faster than the original service.  Avatar had 115K avatars, after acquisition it is now merged with WordPress pool of over 1M avatars.

Are we there yet? Well almost! I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about when 1.1.0 gold will be out. We are almost there, with the arrival of the rc1 release, we are now in feature freeze and have already branched the code. Hence, any new development will now go into 1.2.0 code base and the 1.1.0 branch will only get critical bug fixes and localization updates. This will allow us to quickly reach the proven stability status and hence be able to release 1.1.0 gold. I am optimistic that this can happen pretty quick since this rc1 came after four alpha releases that were deployed in a lot of production sites including our own official bug tracker.

This release includes features like db2 support, XWiki integration and tagging. It also has security improvements and some localization updates. All users of Mantis 1.1.0aX are encouraged to upgrade.

For Mantis instances that use non-latin characterset, there is no automated upgrade path for data already in the database. Hence, this wiki page guides you through the upgrade process. Please backup before you attempt to upgrade. It is also recommended to test the upgrade process on a backup instance rather than the live one.

Following are some Mantis related services:

• Mantis Blog - The blog is used for news and updates relating to Mantis. The old news feature on the home page will be phased out and replaced by the blog. Users are encouraged to subscribe to the blog RSS feed.
• Mantis Twitter - Twitter will is used for keeping Mantis users (followers of Mantis twitter) updated with all issues that are resolved in the bug tracker and manual updates that are added relating to releases, etc. If you have a Twitter account, it is recommend that you follow “mantisbt” Twitter account.
• Mantis Job Board - There is now a Mantis Job Board that allows the Mantis Community to post and find job posts. The cost for posting a job is $30 $10 per month. The latest jobs also show up on Mantis web pages via the Job Board widget.
• MantisWAP: Access Mantis from your cell phone / PDA.
• MantisConnect: Access Mantis via Webservice from Java, .NET, Cocoa, and others (the webservice is now included out-of-the-box with 1.1.0a4, however, the client libraries will remain hosted by MantisConnect project):
• Forums: Mantis support forums. Please use the forums so that you can get more prompt responses and others can benefit and contribute. Please do not use “Contact Us” page for support.
• Wiki: Documentation, Requirements, How-To Guides, etc.
• Bug Tracker: Official Bug Tracker to report Mantis Bugs and Feature requests.
• Mantis Demo: A demo instance
• Mantis Manual

This is the fourth alpha release for Mantis 1.1.0. It is likely to be the last alpha. The next release is planned to be an rc1 release with which we will branch the code and implement a feature freeze. This release has more than 100 features and bug fixes including addition of MantisConnect SOAP API, Twitter integration, permalink filters, MediaWiki integration, custom relationships, more reporting in summary page, project info page, 6 security fixes and a lot of other fixes and improvements. It is a recommended upgrade for all 1.1.0aX installations.

For Mantis instances that use non-latin characterset, there is no automated upgrade path for data already in the database. Hence, this wiki page guides you through the upgrade process. Please backup before you attempt to upgrade. It is also recommended to test the upgrade process on a backup instance rather than the live one.

I would like to take this chance to announce three new services:

1. Mantis Blog - The blog will be used for news and updates relating to new features. The old news feature on the home page will be phased out and replaced by the blog. Users are encouraged to subscribe to the blog RSS feed.
2. Mantis Twitter - Twitter will be used for keeping Mantis users (followers of Mantis twitter) updated with all issues that are resolved in the bug tracker and manual updates that are added relating to releases, etc. If you have a Twitter account, it is recommend that you follow “mantisbt” Twitter account.
3. Mantis Job Board - There is now a Mantis Job Board that allows the Mantis Community to post and find job posts. The cost for posting a job is $30 per month. The latest jobs also show up on Mantis web pages via the Job Board widget.

Following are other related services:

• MantisWAP: Access Mantis from your cell phone / PDA.
• MantisConnect: Access Mantis via Webservice from Java, .NET, Cocoa, and others (the webservice is now included out-of-the-box with 1.1.0a4, however, the client libraries will remain hosted by MantisConnect project):
• Forums: Mantis support forums.
• Wiki: Documentation, Requirements, How-To Guides, etc.
• Bug Tracker: Official Bug Tracker to report Mantis Bugs and Feature requests.
• Mantis Demo: A demo instance
• Mantis Manual