Mr N

Mantis Bug Tracker is an open source bug and issue tracker. We use it here to help track work requested by our customers. I wrote the time tracking and billing section, which is one of my claims to fame!

When a customer creates an issue on the system, I get an email notification directing me to the new issue. The customers and I conduct a our questions and answers by appending text items to the issue. These text items are referred to as bugnotes. Everything is displayed on the same page so it’s really handy as a reference.

One facility it provides is to link issues together in relationships for example “parent of” or “related to". Occasionally, in a bugnote you will need to refer to a another issue or to a particular bugnote somewhere else on the system. Mantis provides a set of really handy short cuts which helps you do this. It means that you don’t have to provide actual “a href” html links as the bugnote renderer handles them for you. It’s handy because if you change the location of the issue tracker to a new part of your website all the links change as well.

There are 2 short cuts that can be inserted in the body of the bugnote.

Short cuts to other issues
Prefix the issue number with a hash.

#123

Short cuts to other bugnotes
Prefix the issue number with a tilde.

~123

The bugnote renderer converts web addresses and email addresses into clickable links so you don’t need to worry about them either.