External clients support for Trac tickets

Notice: This plugin is unmaintained and available for adoption.

Description

Many people and organizations use Trac internally or privately to manage tasks they perform for different clients. This plugin adds capabilities to Trac to help manage different clients.

Key features:

• Add, edit and remove clients via the Trac Admin interface.
• Define a default "Hourly Rate" for each client, useful when used in conjunction with WorkLogPlugin and TimingAndEstimationPlugin.
• Adds "Client Work Summary" report for use with TimingAndEstimationPlugin.
• Flexible Event structure to keep clients selectively informed by:
  • Defining custom events which tie together Summaries and Actions.
  • Defining special blocks (via a WikiProcessor) in which you can embed content that you want to share with a client in ticket descriptions and comments which can be incorporated into Summaries.

Screenshots

The client overview screen is as follows:

Other screenshots:

• Clients Admin​
• Client Detail​
• Events Admin​
• Event Detail​
• Ticket Fields​

Events

The events system is very flexible and allows you to customise the way you interact with your clients. As it is often convenient to use a single Trac instance for internal management purposes, it is typically inappropriate to give direct access to Trac to your clients. However, using Trac to keep your clients informed is still very desirable.

To do this, the ClientsPlugin contains several Summaries which summarise the current status, or the changes in status over time, for each client into an XML object. This object is then passed on to an Action which can process this summary accordingly and actually do something useful with it.

The current Summaries available are:

• Milestone Summary: (XML info) Creates a summary of all tickets grouped by milestone (for future milestones with a delivery date attached).
• Ticket Changes: Ticket changes/comments since the last time the event was triggered.

The current Actions available are:

• Send Email: (XSLT info) Send an email to the client.
• Post to Zendesk: Post to a ​Zendesk forum.

The system allows some key setup parameters to be defined in the event itself (eg an XSLT to reformat the XML object into an HTML email, or a username/password for interacting with Zendesk), and also certain parameters for each event on a per-client basis (eg a list of client specific email addresses to send the summary).

Event Recipes

Here are some detailed examples to help you get started. Please feel free to post your own!

• Weekly Milestone Summary sent by Email

Triggering Events

So how do you trigger an event? This can currently be achieved via a simple script that can be run via a crontab entry or scheduled task. This script is clientsplugin/trunk/cron/run-client-event​.

Custom Fields

ClientsPlugin will automatically add some custom fields to your trac.ini file when it is installed.

Bugs/Feature Requests

Existing bugs and feature requests for ClientsPlugin are here.

If you have any issues, create a new ticket.

defect	34 / 40
enhancement	0 / 2
task	1 / 1

Download

Download the zipped source from here.

Source

Check out ClientsPlugin using Subversion from here, or browse the source​ with Trac.

Installation

General instructions on installing Trac plugins can be found on the TracPlugins page.

Recent Changes

17712 by rjollos on 2020-04-29 21:10:15

TracClients 0.5dev: Adapt to Trac 1.0+ API

Fixes #13754.

17704 by rjollos on 2020-04-29 02:25:26

TracClients 0.5dev: Fix failure in db upgrade

Fixes #13752.

17217 by rjollos on 2018-06-21 16:59:24

TracClients 0.5dev: Add lxml to install reqs

(more)

Author/Contributors

Author: coling
Maintainer: none (needsadoption)
Contributors: rjollos