Cira Plugin

Before you say anything... This plugin is intended to be a an example of the flexibility of confluence. It has no practical value whatsoever. Cira is not and never could be a substitue for a real issue tracking system.

Description/Features

Cira is a set of macros that allows Confluence to be used as a basic issue tracking system. It allows issues to be grouped into projects and queried using labels and per object properties.

As well as supporting normal issue creation it will also have the ability to have dashboard style portlets that show you all of the issues that you are assigned to, have raised or have voted on.

It will also support change notifications using the standard confluence page changed events as the issue description will be handled as page content and comments will be handled via the normal page commenting process. ie Reporters and watchers will be automatically registered for page change notifications.

It does not support more advanced features like issue security or moving issues across projects.

Usage

After installing the plugin create a new page and add the dashboard macro to it. View the page and if you are an admin, you will see a link to create a new project. Click on the link and fill in the details of the project. The versions and components should be a comma seperated list. Once you have created a project, that is all of the setup done. You are now ready to raise issues against the new project. Once setup, the dashboard page will show you a list of at most 10 issues that you have assigned to you as well as the a list of all projects managed by the dashboard.

The dahboard macro should only be used on the home page of the space. Having multiple dashboards in a single space will freak the searching out. However, you can have as many projects as you want in a dashboard.

Creating a new issue

To create an issue, navigate to the project sumamry page and click on the "Create Issue" link. Fill in the appropriate details and submit the form. You will be redirected to the issue page where you can edit and perform workflow operations on it. To change the detail or summary simply edit the page (the summary is the exceprt) and to add a comment, just use the standard add comment feature of confluence.

Issue workflow

Once you have an issue you can progress it through the workflow by following the links in the "Issue Workflow" section. The actions available will depend on the current status of the issue (the rules are similar to Jira). You can also vote and watch the issue. At the moment, voting does nothing but set a label on the issue. Watching will turn on page change notifications for you as well as setting a personal label. Unwatching/Unvoting will obviously undo a watch/vote operation. Cira, like Jira will not let a user vote for an issue they created. Anonymous users are alos unable to vote or watch an issue, as it is impossible to create a label for the anonymous user.

Searching for issues

To search for issues click on the "Find Issues" link on the project page which will take you to the issue navigator. Fill in the filter criteria on the left and click the find button to get a list of matching issues. To open an issue click on the issue's key in the results area.

Version History

1.0 Initial release

TODO

• Make the screens look nice
• Move the create project action into a velocity template
• Create an update project action
• Add more filters to the issue navigator
• Validate assignee field
• Notifications when the content of a page is not changing (property updates)
• Searching across projects
• Participate in page indexing to allow searches directly from the search page
• Create a theme to totally hide the implementation from the user

Screenshots

none, it is far too ugly to be showing off