Hello, Trac development community! I'm writing because I'm (tentatively) interested in becoming involved in the Trac development community.
I've always really liked Trac, and insisted on it for several large projects, but when I picked up the Trac 0.12 multirepo branch and Mercurial plugin early this summer, and found the third party ecosystem to be far more vital than it once was, it basically made my head explode. Trac has been my tool of choice for big coding projects, but it seems that now that multiple repository support is in the pipeline, Trac has tremendous potential as a knowledge management and simple project management tool for the kinds of projects that I work on. I would like to start contributing to Trac and the discussion about Trac. I also don't want to parachute in, but this sure seems to be a pretty friendly and smart community. I've been reading the mailing list archives and look through the proposals on the wiki, and following the active development branches. I've also started to develop some themes and play around with hacking on Trac core. To provide some context: My two big projects these days are FreeGeek/ Chicago (http://www.freegeekchicago.org), and the Invisible Institute (http://invisibleinstitute.com), which both need to combine knowledge management, collaborative documentation / writing, light software development, and simple project management. Both groups are "layperson"-heavy -- for each group, there's a small number (in the case of Invisible Institute, it's just me) of highly technical folks, and a larger group of collaborators with more varying skill levels who are directly working with the tools and documentation created by the geeks. Both projects have used various knowledge and project management tools over the years (a variety of wikis, 37Signals' Basecamp, activeCollab), and I've been dissatisfied with them generally. Basecamp has come the closest, but its knowledge management tools are kind of terrible (fatal, for my work), its company/project structure doesn't mesh well with the ad-hocracy of my world, and I don't appreciate the beliefs or behaviors of some of 37Signals' most visible people. I'm convinced that Trac can provide a really effective collaboration platform for my projects, one that's better and more suited to our needs than Basecamp or anything else ever was. A great deal of this is UI/theming, configuration, quality of content, and thoughtful use of macros and plugins, but I'm also (I hope) handy enough in Python to lend a hand on a more fundamental level. To that end, I've been: * Working on a theme that uses the Blueprint css library and makes Trac look a little slicker. I like the default theme *a lot* -- it is a great, straightforward default, better than most open source packages. But I'm curious how it can be made more usable by the smart layperson. Using Blueprint has the added advantage, when mixed with div processors, of allowing very flexible layouts. Because I don't know Trac well enough yet, the current incarnation of the theme is pretty unholy and hacked up, but there's a live demo at http://blueprintdemo.invisibleinstitute.com/ if anyone wants to see. * Experimenting with rewriting the notification system to be more robust and have less of an explicit connection between email, tickets, and notifications. I'm curious how I should bring this work to the development community. I've been working against the 0.12-multirepos branch, but it sounds like this work would make more sense in the discussed 0.13 (enhancements) branch. I also don't want to conflict with other on-going projects (the journaling proposal had a lot of paralles to what I've been doing), so I'd also love to know if there's been much discussion of notification handling. I'd like more robust email processing, and an architecture that makes it easier to integrate with other services (like the dreaded Twitter). * Writing a lot on effective use of Trac, deployment issues on Debian, etc, to someday go on the soon-to-be-revamped invisibleinstitute.com on a blog I've set up for myself. I've been writing a lot of Drupal code over the past few years, and most of my Python knowledge was forged when I studied physics, so I probably will wind up writing some offensive code. But I'd like to contribute back to Trac, and help Trac kick ass. David Eads http://invisibleinstitute.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Development" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/trac-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
