Add a discussion tab for Trac resources

[Karsten.Kraus@…]

Was originally: Is it possible to integrate a thread-based "view" (something like a phpbb) with trac?

I'm in a development team which consists of many people from different departments of our company. For now, we're using a forum for "informal" discussion of feature-proposals (where everyone can contribute), an issuetracking system as a "formal" way to categorize and track our development progress (which is managed by a few "head developers) and a wiki for documentation purposes (which again is open for all users). So the "life cycle" of a feature looks like this: proposal > discussion between all developers > creating of an "ticket" with formal specs (deliverables etc.) in bugtracker which may be commented on by everyone but responsibility for the ticket is held by a "head developer" > actual coding > documentation in wiki.

Trac really looks great for combining the "formal" project-management with documentation and source-code-management but the wiki-based "view" is (IMHO) to complicated for the initial, informal discussion. The ticket-view is better suited for that, but doing informal discussions there would weaken (again IMHO) the formal "progress-tracking" approach as there will be many tickets which won't make it to a "real" issue.

So to keep all the relevant development information in one place/system it would be great, if one could have some "forum"-like functionality with a threaded view.

Kind Regards

Karsten

[markus]

Maybe Trac-Hack's discussion forum plugin is what you're looking for. You can find it here

[cboos]

With Trac 0.9, you'll get TicketTypes. With that, you can can create a ticket for your feature proposal and categorize it as such (RFC for instance).

Then, if the proposed feature survives the informal discussion phase, you have the option to change its type to Enhancement, or alternatively you can close it and make a final note pointing to a brand new Enhancement ticket.

[Karsten.Kraus@…]

Wow! Thank you for the quick and helpful answers!

[bruno@…]

Have a look at Discussion forum plugin.

[Karsten.Kraus@…]

As my request can be solved with the already existing Discussion forum plugin, i'm gonna try to close this ticket ;-)

[cboos]

Just stumbled upon this ticket again... now that we have reply to feature for tickets, it would also be interesting to get an alternate "threaded" view for ticket comments.

This could be done actually for any resource, having a "formal" view of the resource and an "informal" one, a discussion of the changes.

So I'd like to add a "Discussion" tab for any Trac resource. In some situations, like tickets, the "discussion" is perhaps better viewed inlined, as it is now. For most others, like Wiki, changesets, milestones, it seems best displayed in a tab, as an "alternate view" of the resource.

See also:

• TracProject/UiGuidelines, for a discussion of the user interface
• TracDev/Proposals/DataModel, for a discussion of the generic implementation of comments
• TracObjectModelProposal, for a discussion of the resource idea (well, should perhaps become TracDev/Proposals/ResourceDescriptor?)

[cboos]

The summary has been changed to reflect the new intent of the ticket (comment:6).