Discussion Forums and Other Plugins

After our upgrade to Trac 0.12 in January, we decided it was time to add support for some more Trac plugins. We have been tracking the plugin requests that our customers have been making, and have determined a number of plugins that we believe will be useful for many of our customers. Today we have launched the first batch of new plugins. Our plan is to release a couple more batches of plugins over the next few weeks.

Discussion Forums

This plugin adds a "Forums" tab to Trac that lets you manage a set of discussion forums. You can use Trac permissions to determine who can post to forums, and you can also set a list of moderators. Forums may also be placed into groups to help keep things organized. Users may subscribe to Forums or Topics and then receive email updates for them. This is a great way to collaborate as a team or to build a community around your project.

Batch Modify Tickets

Have you ever needed to make the same change to a dozen tickets? It can get pretty tedious. Now you can simply enable this plugin and make all your changes in one operation. Maybe you need to close a bunch of tickets or assign them to another milestone. Simply go to the "View Tickets" tab and click on "Custom Query" in the top-right corner of the page. This will let you construct a query that will match the tickets you would like to change. Then click to expand the "Batch Modify" box at the bottom of the page, which allows you to make the changes to the tickets.

Spam Blocker

If you've opened your Trac projects up so that anonymous users can post tickets, you may have run into problems with spam. Enabling this plugin will help avoid this situation by placing a captcha on the New Ticket page for any users that don't have the CAPTCHA_SKIP Trac permission. We use the popular reCAPTCHA as our captcha of choice. Note that you will most likely want to place the CAPTCHA_SKIP permission on the "authenticated" group, so that only anonymous users can see the captcha.