First Impressions of RT V3.6.0rc2

RT Users
1

Hi Everyone,

I thought I would take a look at RT 3.6.0rc2 this morning to see what it
would take to upgrade from 3.4.4.

On installation, the install required installing two perl CPAN modules
and it failed to do it via “make fixdeps”, so I had to do them by hand.
Not a big deal. The rest of the install/upgrade went flawlessly. Let’s
just say it was much easier to go from 3.4.4 to 3.6.0rc, than it was to
go from 2.4.x to 3.4.4. I had the software configured and upgraded in
less than 10 minutes.

Logging in, frankly I like the user interface to 3.4.4 better, I think
the lack of shading and borders causes a lot more eye strain, especially
on an all white background. My eyes are not very good and the lack of
definition is really hard on the eyes. Also, because of the much larger
fonts, one needs a 20" screen or larger to get a good display; on
smaller displays one will be either seeing a lot of line wraps or using
the arrow bars on the side and bottom of the screen to move the display
around.

I found the adding of reports was a good addition, as well as validation
in custom fields. I suspect there is a setting in RT_Config.pm that
allows for entering dates in MM/DD/YYYY format. Yes, I know the US is
one of the few countries that use it; I personally prefer the DD/MM/YYYY
format, but I am in a minority here.

I like the Ticket Quick Search option

Some bugs I noticed. Links do not show up in Asset Tracker (v1.2.3) and
the “Tickets per day per Queue” screen for RTx::Statistics (v0.1.8) does
not display anything, but the spreadsheet does. All the other
RTx::Statistics functions work. RTx::Matrix and RTFM seem to work, but I
really did nothing but display things.

I did not do an extensive test like create tickets, manipulate assets,
etc, but I did a cursory look at the software. All in all this looks
like a great upgrade, but I would give folks the option to keep the
3.4.4 style interface or use the interface introduced in 3.6.0rc2.

Take care!

Nick

Nick Metrowsky

Consulting System Administrator

303-684-4785 Office

303-684-4100 Fax

nmetrowsky@digitalglobe.com mailto:nmetrowsky@digitalglobe.com

DigitalGlobe (r), An Imaging and Information Company

http://www.digitalglobe.com http://www.digitalglobe.com

2

I did not do an extensive test like create tickets, manipulate assets,
etc, but I did a cursory look at the software. All in all this looks
like a great upgrade, but I would give folks the option to keep the
3.4.4 style interface or use the interface introduced in 3.6.0rc2.

We’ve done that. Have a look in RT’s configuration file.

3

Hi Jesse,

Thank you for the tip. It is appreciated.

Also, when I switched to “3.4-compat” mode, the links for Asset Tracker
V1.2.3 now work. I will admit, “3.4-compat” mode is much easier on the
eyes and it provides slightly larger fonts, the best of both worlds.

Take care!

Nick

PS I found where to change the date format, as well.

Nick Metrowsky
Consulting System Administrator
303-684-4785 Office
303-684-4100 Fax
nmetrowsky@digitalglobe.com
DigitalGlobe (r), An Imaging and Information Company
http://www.digitalglobe.com-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Vincent [mailto:jesse@bestpractical.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 9:25 AM
To: Nick Metrowsky
Cc: rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com
Subject: Re: [rt-users] First Impressions of RT V3.6.0rc2

I did not do an extensive test like create tickets, manipulate assets,
etc, but I did a cursory look at the software. All in all this looks
like a great upgrade, but I would give folks the option to keep the
3.4.4 style interface or use the interface introduced in 3.6.0rc2.

We’ve done that. Have a look in RT’s configuration file.

4

Logging in, frankly I like the user interface to 3.4.4 better, I think
the >lack of shading and borders causes a lot more eye strain,
especially on an

Does anyone have any screen shots of the new interface handy? Im quite
excited to see it.

duncan

5

Logging in, frankly I like the user interface to 3.4.4 better, I think
the >lack of shading and borders causes a lot more eye strain,
especially on an

Does anyone have any screen shots of the new interface handy? Im quite
excited to see it.

I setup a quick an dirty demo instance of RT
3.6.0rc2/SQLite/Standalone_HTTPD available at
http://demo.request-tracker.org:8080/ I’ll leave it up for a few days if
anyone wants to see what the new version looks like. Be warned however,
it is very slow (my system, not RT). Login is ‘guest’ with ‘rt36guest’

Enjoy

Joshua Colson jcolson@voidgate.org

6

Thanks for the demo site Joshua.

So far I’m impressed with 3.6.0, “simple search” will do a lot to
appease the masses (“waaaaah, searching is too hard, so I’ll keep
creating new tickets to ask about old tickets”).

I was hoping that it would include a feature to change ticket history
sorting (ascending/descending) as an individual preference (e.g.
showing newest transactions at the top, patch:
http://wiki.bestpractical.com/index.cgi?ReverseHistoryOrder). This
would be especially useful for long tickets. This was a very important
feature for me when my pages were loading slowly on old hardware (e.g. 2
minutes when there are a lot of transactions), but now that I’m running
RT on real server hardware and those especially long pages just take a
few seconds. I do realize of course that I can apply the patch (“waaaah,
how come the feature I want isn’t in the main build”…).

But I can see that “click-sorting” can be done for lists of tickets
which is really great.

Regarding the new layout:

  • Losing the left nav-bar is a great choice.
  • The rounded top “nav-bars” look good.
  • The Ticket metadata seems to take up a lot more space now, especially
    if you have a lot of custom fields. I like the older style smaller
    fonts better. If you are viewing on a laptop screen, that would be 2
    page-downs before you got to the transactions.
  • There seems to be larger whitespace between sections Also there
    appears to be extra “border” area on the outside edges of the different
    boxes. Both of those are wastes of space IMHO.
  • Could everything above the top “nav-bar” (logo, search, new ticket in,
    logged in as) be moved to the same level as the top nav-bar somehow, or
    just be the width 1 a nav-bar?
  • Would people be able to choose a 3.4.x “classic” layout just by
    changing the stylesheet? It might be nice to have a “large-font” and
    “small-font” style-sheet option.
  • I agree with other folks that all of the “white space” makes it “too
    bright”, thus adding eye-strain. Perhaps a more muted color, like the
    one used in wikipedia’s style sheet, for empty space would help (or just
    having less white space).

Thanks for all the hard work!

Mike Patterson
Systems Manager
UC Berkeley Extension

7

On installation, the install required installing two perl CPAN
modules and it failed to do it via “make fixdeps”, so I had to do
them by hand. Not a big deal. The rest of the install/upgrade went
flawlessly. Let’s just say it was much easier to go from 3.4.4 to
3.6.0rc, than it was to go from

care to share what those two modules were?

smime.p7s (2.47 KB)