Customizing RT 3.0 -- Best Practices?

RT Users
1

Hello again, everyone. I’m stuck.

I love RT, and I think it will do wonders for my organization. However, I need to customize it signficantly for it to be user-friendly.

I need custom input/modify/display forms for tickets in various queues. Such as, template forms for various queues (or types of tickets in queues) so that they match the mentality of the input user.

I need to “automate” simple things like adding CC groups. Such as, check off the boxes of the groups who need to be CC’d on this ticket (instead of searching and adding them them individually).

What I’ve started to do is create custom ticket/Create.html ticket/Modify.html, etc. forms in order to accomplish this. I’m thinking of creating a custom start page to link users to these various templates. However, this seems really cumbersome. I’ve not finished one yet, so I don’t even know if this will work.

Is there anyone who has accomplished any of this yet, or any “best practices” in doing such a thing? I want to keep RT as intact as possible, but it’s looking more and more like I’ll have to unbundle it. I’m having a real difficult time with perldoc (name the module here) documentation. It all seems disjointed and uncohesive. (Nothing against the developers - what I have is still more than I’d expect from a free product…)

Thanks again.

2

Hi Russ

Is there anyone who has accomplished any of this yet, or any “best
practices” in doing such a thing? I want to keep RT as intact as
possible, but it’s looking more and more like I’ll have to unbundle it.

You may be better off on the rt-devel list, but basically RT has a
wonderful extensions mechanism. I’m just starting to play with it, but
it might help to install RTFM and see how that handles extending RT’s
functionality.

Daniel Foster
Technical Director

3

Is there anyone who has accomplished any of this yet, or any “best
practices” in doing such a thing?

The two most important things are to use HTML::Mason’s local feature
and the overlay feature of most of the RT API modules. If you are
going to add or customize Mason components put them in
/path/to/rt3/local/html. Leave /path/to/rt3/share/html alone. For code
overlays, make your changes in *_Local.pm. There are a few existing
*_Overlay.pm modules that you can use as a starting point.

Michael
Michael S. Liebman m-liebman@northwestern.edu
http://msl521.freeshell.org/
“I have vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”
-Paul Newman in “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid”