A brief update on what we've been working on

While we’ve been hard at work on RT 3.2.x, that hasn’t been all we’ve
been focusing on. RT 3.2 focuses mainly on library and interface-level
changes to improve your experience. We’ve also been working on what
will become RT 3.4 later this summer. The big change coming in RT 3.4
is the further generalization and extension of the “Custom Field”
system. As of 3.4, custom fields can now apply to Ticket comments and
correspondence, users and groups. Additionally, we’ve got new “full
text” custom fields which let you type in large blocks of text, “file
upload” custom fields and “image” custom fields which let you upload
images which will be displayed inside RT’s UI.

Those of you who watch svn://svn.bestpractical.com closely have likely
noticed a proliferation of smaller RT-related projects cropping up
there. These projects represent the first steps of a new strategy to
decouple features (that not everyone may want) from the core RT engine.
Some of them are fully-working tools. Others are skeletons for future
projects:

RT-Journal/
	This is The blog engine that powered "pallas.eruditorum.org"
	this spring. It's being retooled for release atop RT 3.2
RT-OnlineDocs/
	This tool presents a "webified" copy of RT's API
	documentation from within the RT Web UI. (Locked down so
	only superusers can poke at it)

RT-ProjectManager/
	This is the skeleton of the Project Manager frontend we
	put together about two years ago now. It's not expected
	to run right away, but doesn't need a whole lot of work
 	to get a hierarchical edit-view going.

RT-Scope/
	This is a new framed layout for use in customer-service 
	scenarios where individual staffers need to deal with a
	large volume of incoming email.  It's still rough around
	the edges, but we've found it very useful already.

RTx-Atom/
RT-Client/

	 The RT::Atom API and the RT::Client client library
	 form the core of a new XML-based RPC mechanism (and
	 fully scriptable remote client API that's compliant 
	 with version 0.3 of the AtomAPI specification. Look for
	 a 1.0 release within the next month or two. The
	 RT::Client library is available under the same terms as
	 Perl itself, so you can tie your proprietary
	 applications to RT without using GPLed code.

RT-Integration-CVS/
RT-Integration-SVN/

	  Watch this space.






Best,

Jesse Vincent
Best Practical Solutions, LLC

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Subject: [rt-users] [Rt-announce] A brief update on what we’ve been
workingon

… As of 3.4, custom fields can now apply to Ticket comments and
correspondence, users and groups.

Will that mean that each (comment/correspondence) transaction can have
an individual value for a particular custom field? We need to classify
the timeworked for each transaction in terms of billable/not, and thus
want a “per transaction” custom field in which to do it. This sounds
like what we need!

Thanks for the summary, by the way – VERY useful to know what might be
coming down the road.

Jim