The Internet Department is pleased to announce a new and shiny bug tracker, integrated directly into WeBBspace!

Visible in the primary links menu at the top of the page, you can now access a list of STF Projects. Right now there's just one, for WeBBspace itself, but we can add an unlimited number. For each project, you can create any number of issues, or tasks, that anyone can follow-up on or work on. We'll likely have one for each department before long.

From now on, all bug reports should be submitted to the WeBBspace project rather than posted in the IDept ship.

The tracking system in question is the Drupal project module, which is used by Drupal.org itself for tracking development of Drupal. While it's a beast of a system at times, by using the same system we know that it's going to be maintained for a long time to come and any work we do on it can directly benefit the Drupal community. Such work probably won't happen for a while yet, though, as most work on project module is going into porting it to Drupal 6. :-)

One drawback is that for now, there is no direct association between a department board and a project. While unfortunate, I think it is an acceptable at this point as we are likely to have only a half-dozen projects at most for the foreseeable future.

If you are a department director and want a project setup for your department, contact me directly and I can get you hooked up. For other more targeted projects, talk to me and we'll figure out if it's worth its own project or not.

For those who have been asking "Larry, how can I help you with WeBBspace?" this new system should help answer that. The biggest help would be supporting code, much of which will need to go back to Drupal itself. By having a central repository of "things to do", people can volunteer to work on them in a clear and obvious way, and if they don't follow through then we know about it. :-) Even if that doesn't work out, it means we'll still have a way to show what the IDept (or any other department) is up to, what the progress is on it, etc. Neato!

Now, let's just hope we don't bring down the system with all the code I just added. ;-)