[ILUG] web logging/forum software

[Niall O Broin]

On Wednesday 31 March 2004, paulr at maths.tcd.ie (Paul Reilly) wrote:

>I'm looking for some kind of web logging system, which acts
>a bit like a forum and a bit like a mailing list, and a bit like
>a request tracker/ticket system.

>So it's a bit like a tracking system, but without the topic status
>aspect. It's a bit like a weblog but with email interface to it.
>I could probably hack something together in php, but I'm wondering
>if anything like this exists already.
>
>Failing that, does anyone know which free forum packages, have
>email functionality? PHPbb doesn't do the business.

I needed to do something like this recently, and had quite a look
around. I had actually installed RT, which I had previously used, before
realising that it really was too much for the job at hand. So I ended up
using jitterbug. It is a CGI program written in C by Andrew Tridgell to
support the Samba project which does nearly all of what you need.

>* Users should be able to create their own topics.

All messages are stored as files in directories on the filesystem.
Topics correspond to directories, and are even called this in the web
interface. Logged in users can create their own directories (topics).

>* Users should be able to update topics by web, or email (direct
>  email input to specified topic)

OK - this is the only place it falls down. When you input a problem
report by email, it goes by default into the topic incoming. The problem
I suppose would be how to specify a topic in an email. You could work
out some kind of coding, but what happens if somebody specifies an
non-existing topic (which of course you can't do from the web interface
from a drop down list)

>* all updates should archived on web, for later perusal

There is an audit trail of changes.

>* any updates to a topic should be emailed to those subscribed to
>  the topic.

This does exist, called Notification, but I'm not sure how it functions
as we don't use it. You can set a notification list per ticket, but I'm
not sure if you can have a default list per ticket.

Anyway, it might be worth looking at. It's no longer maintained, so
finding the source might be a little tricky (you'll find a jitterbug
page somewhere belonging to Andrew Tridgell, which has a demo, and some
information, but the link to the source from there doesn't work). I
apt-got it. Also, there is now a project on sourceforge called jitterbug
which is completely unrelated.


Niall