How To

Introduction

FaultPress is a revolutionary theme which transforms WordPress into a bug tracking and ticketing application. It’s designed to be used by anyone with a product or service which requires user feedback with regards to improving / adding features and fixing bugs.

Before we delve into FaultPress’ features, heres an explanation of the parts that make up the theme.

FaultPress lets you track issues/bugs/problems in your project; the theme allows for 1 project per installation (if you are using Multisite WordPress you can have multiple FaultPress instances running on the same WordPress install, we’ll cover that later).

When a user, or a member of your team, finds a problem with your product they can raise a bug ticket. Tickets contain information on the bug, as well as useful information used for tracking the problems solution, for example, the ticket’s status, priotity, and which contributor is assigned to fix the problem.

When developing your project you may release new updates and different versions, or just have set targets you wish to meet; these are milestones. Milestones are made up of many tickets.

After viewing a ticket and (if applicable) fixing the issue the ticket can be resolved – this allows your team to effectively fix issues with your products.

Important installation notes

After installing and activating the theme, you need to navigate to Settings > Permalinks and click on the“Save Changes” button, even if you haven’t made any changes. This is to register the custom post types and taxonomies used in the theme.

You should also note:

• FaultPress installs 1 new database table when you install it called faultpress_watching_tickets. This stores data about the tickets that you are watching.
• FaultPress adds 1 new user role; bug submitter. The bug submitter can submit new tickets, but cannot edit tickets.
• FaultPress comes with 6 custom widgets; these are outlined later.
• FaultPress installs 3 custom post types (tickets, activity items, messages) and several new taxonomies.
• During activation, FaultPress creates several new pages and page templates for its core functionality (for example, a ticket submit page)
• When activated, FaultPress uses its own cool email template – you will see this when WordPress sends out a system email.

Getting Started

As mentioned above, FaultPress supports one project per install. After installing the theme you are pretty much ready to go – if you go to the front-end of the site you will notice the area in the header for logged in users/admin:

The dashboard link takes you back to WordPress admin – its just here for convenience. Next to that you’ll notice the project settings button – click it to set up your project’s information. You’ll have access to the following settings:

• Project Title – You should name your project here. The name will show in the title bar of your browser, as well as on other parts of the site – this is essentially the same options as in the backend for controlling the blog name.
• Project Description – The project description will show on your site’s homepage. This is the same as the blog description option in the backend.
• Current Milestone – This is where you set your current project milestone after you create some. The current milestone is always shown on the main navigation bar for quick access.
• Project visibility – This can be set to either public or members only. A members only project will require login; no one will be able to view your tickets except you and any other users you create. A public project can be viewed by unregistered users.
• Message visibility – Messages is a section on your site for posting messages for other users to view and comment on. You can have them publicly visible, viewable by any registered user, or only viewable by contributors (contributors is a member with higher permissions, and in FaultPress this represents users who are working on your project).
• Who can submit tickets? – Set this to guests to allow non-members to submit bug tickets, or only allow members. If the project is not publicly visible, but guest submissions are enabled, non-logged in users will see a special submission form.

So you have set up your project? You’re ready to rock!

The Project Overview page

The project overview page (home) shows you the project title, description, ticket counts, and any recent site activity. Site activity includes comments, submissions, messages and anything else you may do on the front-end.

Creating your first Milestone

For large projects you may want to set goals or milestones. Version 1.0, version 1.1 for example. Milestones can optionally be created from the main navigation bar, or from the milestones page. This should be found at /milestones/.

Each milestone needs a title (for example your version, 1.1) and can optionally have a target release date and a description (this information will be viewable form widgets and on the milestones page). Once created, you can start adding tickets to the milestone, or set it as the current milestone from the project settings page.

When your milestone is complete, go back to the milestones page and click the edit button. You’ll see a ‘complete’ checkbox to mark the milestone as done – if its your current milestone then it will be removed from the navigation bar.

Creating a ticket

Now for the most important part of FaultPress! Tickets. To submit a new ticket either click the link under the ‘tickets’ nav bar item, or click the huge submit button in the sidebar.

When you find that submit button, you’ll be presented with the submit ticket page. Since your an admin (and your special) you get a few extra fields which Guests won’t see (status, milestone etc).

You can assign the ticket to a milestone and a user. By default the current milestone will be selected, and nobody will be assigned to the ticket.

Ticket statuses are applied to each ticket which allows users to easily understand and sort the current status of each ticket. Each ticket can have one of the following statuses applied to it by default:

• New – new tickets
• Open – open tickets
• Hold – for tickets awaiting further discussion before action, or tickets that don’t need to be resolved at present.
• Invalid – for tickets invalid to the current project
• Resolved – for tickets/bugs which have been fixed/resolved

Tickets can have a priority. More urgent problems can be highlighted and critical ones highlighted further. The following priorities can be applied to tickets;

• Critical
• High
• Medium
• Low

Tags can be added to the ticket to make it easy to find later on, and finally you can attach a single file to the ticket using the file uploader – it will be visible on the ticket page.

After adding the ticket FaultPress will send notifications out to users and also create an activity item (viewable on the homepage) telling everyone a new ticket has been submitted.

Managing and updating tickets

View any ticket and you will see an ‘update’ form below it’s details. This lets you update the status of a ticket (for example, when you resolve it) and also creates an activity item informing users of the change. Other users can comment on the ticket from here also.

If you don’t want to update the ticket, but need to edit it, use the edit button. Editing tickets can be done from the backend only and won’t create an activity item.

Ticket Listings & Quick Resolve

Viewing any ticket archive you will notice several links above the tickets, such as status, #, age etc – clicking these will sort the list of tickets. You will also notice that if you hover over an active (new or open) ticket you will see a little arrow button pop-up -this is the quick resolve button and will mark the ticket as resolved.

Watching tickets (and messages)

When creating a ticket, or being assigned to a ticket, you will ‘watch’ it. This simply means that you will be alerted via email when it is updated. You can change this behaviour by editing your profile from the front-end (the link for this is in the top navigiation). You can also unwatch a ticket by going to its page and click the unwatch button.

Messages

Messages function similarly to the blog with the key difference being that they can be made private for internal use. Once messages have been set to private only your team members will be able to read them and post comments; this makes them a great way to privately discuss matters which perhaps do not directly relate to any particular ticket or milestone.

About Guest Tickets

Guests can submit tickets using a slightly different form which has no status/milestone fields, and has fields for name and email. If your project is non-public, but guest submissions are enabled, you will get a special submit page which only contains the project overview (no sidebar or other pages).

If you wish to change the way guest ticket submissions work, you can do so from the FaultPress admin panel:

You are able to modify the following options:

• Hold guest tickets for moderation?
• Allow attachments in guest tickets?
• Guest ticket status
• Guest ticket priority

Multiple Projects with Multisite

To have multiple projects you should enable WordPress multisite. If FaultPress detects multiple installs it will show a ‘project switcher’ dropdown box in the top navigation – handy!

Widgets

FaultPress comes with a variety of useful widgets for you to use in the sidebar; the following are bundled with the theme (as well as some standard woo widgets):

• Attachments – Shows a list of recently attached files which have been added to tickets and messages.
• Contributors – Lists contributors to the project; contributors are administrators, authors and editors.
• Current Milestone – Shows the current active milestone’s progress with a nice big progress bar.
• Milestones – Lists all active milestones and due-dates.
• My Tickets – Lists tickets you are assigned to organised by status.
• Ticket tags – Shows a tag cloud of ticket tags.

[insert name=”adding-widgets”]

Miscellaneous

Custom Post Types

Once you’ve installed FaultPress it will automatically create the custom post types for different sections of the site. The post types FaultPress uses are listed below…

• Tickets – Your bug tickets
• Messages – Your team messages
• Activity items – These are created when you do something on the site (such as submitting a ticket) and are listed on the homepage/overview screen.

Custom Taxonomies

FaultPress installs the following taxonomies:

• Ticket Status – Stores a tickets status
• Ticket Priority – Stores the tickets priority
• Ticket Milestone – What milestone the ticket is attached to. Each ticket can have 1 milestone only.
• Ticket Tags - As with blog posts, you may want to attach tags to tickets. This works in exactly the same way as the blog section so should come naturally to any seasoned WordPress user.

Mobile Support

FaultPress offers mobile support out of the box via CSS3 Media Queries – it has the following variations:

• Standard
• iPad Landscape
• iPad Portrait
• iPhone Landscape
• iPhone Portrait

You can sample these by resizing your browser window!

Styling FaultPress

FaultPress was built using LESS CSS (a dynamic stylesheet language). Its really easy to get to grips with and will let you restyle the entire theme by changing a few variables. For example, at the top of the style.less file you will find:


@color1: #eee; /* Background */
@color2: #326b7c; /* Links */
@color3: #777; /* Body Copy */
@color4: #84a910; /* cta */
@color5: #EEF9D3; /* update comments */


You can simply change these values, compile your .less file to a .css file and thats it! The entire color scheme will be modified.

If you don’t like less, you can still edit the .css files the old fashioned way!