Productizer: simple CGI allowing non-members to submit to queue

RT Users
1

Hi,

I got bored today and modified my as-yet-unreleased Productizer
CGI to route mail into RT.

Here’s the archive suitable for ./contrib (maybe):

http://www1.jump.net/~arclight/projects/rt/productizer-20000905-
00.tar.gz

The Story:

Once upon a time I got tired of interrogating engineers and product
managers trying to figure out what was required to launch whatever
products they were putting together. Invariably I’d forget something
and have to chase people down, or worse yet, I’d have to track
down and compile 5-10 emails on the subject (like piecing together
a crashed airliner) to understand the essentials of their product.

Hence, the Productizer was born. You put all your questions in a
config file, the form is generated on the fly, people fill it in, and it
writes an HTML summary file of what they entered with a little
commentary. I intended that it make some intelligent suggestions
about hardware purchasing, etc. but I never got around to it. This
was built before we started using RT.

As I said, I got bored today so I added text reporting and SMTP to
the Productizer and now it funnels mail into RT.

The nice thing about the Productizer is that the questions it asks
are all stored in a single config file. It’s not rocket science but it
works fairly well. So, should you want to use Productizer as a
specialized UI for submitting requests to RT, it’s a matter of
changing a config file, not hacking on a lot of perl.

One more bit of trivia: this was built during one of my forays into
Literate Programming so the One True Source file may look a bit
weird to those unfamiliar with LP (it’s designed to processed with
pqtangle (included) and noweb (untested)). See the README file
for more info and rantage. Apologies for the README; I attribute it
to having more Guinness than sleep :slight_smile:

Let me know what you think,

– Bob

2

|Hi,
|
|I got bored today and modified my as-yet-unreleased Productizer
|CGI to route mail into RT.

This is great, thanks. Two quick additions to the documentation:

change the cookie domain (“set domain for cookie”) to the local
domain.

Change the mailhost (“send request to rt via smtp”) to the local
SMTP.

Also, in the directions, after you modify conf_dir, you should
run pqtangle again.

-deborah

3

This is great, thanks. Two quick additions to the documentation:

change the cookie domain (“set domain for cookie”) to the local
domain.

Change the mailhost (“send request to rt via smtp”) to the local
SMTP.

Also, in the directions, after you modify conf_dir, you should
run pqtangle again.

Thanks - I’ve updated the docs and installation process and posted
a new version at

http://www.jump.net/~arclight/projects/rt/productizer-20000905-
01.tar.gz

There aren’t any big code changes but I split README into
README, INSTALL, and HACKING (a new section on customizing
the code). Also, the ‘mailhost’ bug should have caused problems
here except that one of our mailservers is CNAMEd to mailhost in
the local domain.

I’ll shorten the archive name when I stuff all this (back) into version
control.

– Bob