As part of running Mantis there is a lot of work that happens everyday, however, most users only know about it when they receive an email via one of the mailing lists or when they go to the website. There are a lot of other updates that are hidden somewhere in the changelog, the Mantis news, the wiki, or the forums. Hence, I’ve decided to rework the Mantis website to keep the Mantis community up-to-date with the latest in Mantis development. The resolutions are:
- Start a Mantis Blog – in the past I used to use my blog for blogging about Mantis, but I’ve now decided to have a specific blog for Mantis and use this as the main channel for communicating news and getting users opinions about where Mantis should go. This blog will also be used instead of the Mantis news feature which used to be included in the Mantis main page. I still have to do some website re-work to complete this transition. However, please go ahead and subscribe to the RSS news feed to keep up-to-date with Mantis news.
- Use Twitter – Not all news are worth a blog post or an email to a mailing list, however, this doesn’t mean that they are not worthy of being communicated to Mantis community. Hence, Twitter will be used to provide quick updates about what is happening in Mantis land. Some of these news will be auto-generated and others will be added manually. The auto-generated updates will be generated from Mantis Bug Tracker when a news entry is posted, when a bug is resolved, etc.
I figured that if Mantis would benefit from using Twitter, then other projects may as well. Hence, Twitter integration will be included in Mantis out-of-the-box starting with Mantis 1.1.0a4. So far I’ve implemented a couple of scenarios where Twitter updates are generated (news and resolved bugs), but the infrastructure is there and it is very easy to add more integration points. The same infrastructure will also be used to possibly auto-generate twitter updates from other parts of the website.
I would love to hear from the Mantis community with regards to other ways they can be involved and aware of what is happening. Also please feel free to submit to the bug tracker ideas relating to other Mantis events that should generate Twitter updates. Also feel free to submit your feedback as comments to this post.
The Twitter integration is also hooked up to Mantis Demo which uses the mantisdemo twitter channel. You can check it out there and play with it.
Can different projects use different twitters ?
Yes, it is possible to have a twitter account per project, since the account is specified by configuration options and configuration options can be per project.
The configuration can be managed using “Manage > Manage Configuration”. You can then assign to the same configuration option different value for each project.