Features

Devalot has a huge number of features today, and the list is growing.

Plugin Based Authentication

Would you like to install Deavlot at work, and have it use your company’s LDAP server for authentication? What about some other obscure authentication source? No problem. All you have to do is write a small plugin, or have us do it for you.

Or you can use the authenticator that comes with Devalot. It works the way you’d expect:

Users can create new accounts with email confirmation (and activation codes)
You can disable user account creation so only site admins can create accounts
Full administration of accounts from the admin section

Wiki

Devalot includes a wiki system for creating web pages for your project.

Wiki style links and automatic link generation when you mention bug tickets
Each page keeps revision history so you can get back to a previous copy
Optional automatic table of contents generation
Raw text can be transformed by Textile, Markdown, or even RDoc
Support for custom Radius tags

Blog

Each project in Devalot has its own blog for posting project articles or news. It has everything you’d expect in a blog system:

Articles have permalinks
Archive view
Article administration for editing and setting the published status
Viewing articles before they are published
Articles can be tagged and commented on

Ticketing

What would software tracking be without a ticketing system? Most ticketing systems leave you feeling like you want to go back to keeping a bug list in your favorite email program. Not Devalot.

Simple and clean. Those were the major design goals while developing the ticketing system. It should be easy to use for the developers and the end users. You shouldn’t have to look all over a ticket page just to figure out what needs to be done with it.

Unlike a lot of ticketing systems that sprinkle ticket history and comments all over a page, a Devalot ticket looks a lot like a regular web page. The information that you need most often, the ticket description and comments, are clear and unobstructed. Information that you don’t need very often, the full ticket history and attachment list, is safely hidden out of the way can comes to life using a bit of AJAX.

The ticketing system is also very flexible, and can operate in one of four modes:

Off – the project doesn’t use tickets
Open – any registered user can create and view tickets, but only project members can edit tickets
Restricted – similar to Open, except users can only see tickets they have created
Closed – Only project members can create, view, and edit tickets.

We think you’re going to love the Devalot ticketing system.

Project Membership and Roles

Each project in Devalot has its own membership list, the list of users who are part of the project and what their role is. Your role as a project member dictates what you can do with a project, like posting blog articles, for example.

Private Projects

Devalot allows you to set up a private project, that is, a project that can only be viewed by project members. This might be useful for getting a project ready before it is announced, or if you truly want to keep it a secret.

Tagging

Almost everything in Devalot can be tagged. Viewing everything in a project that has a specific tag is easy, as is seeing everything in your entire Devalot installation that has a specific tag. Tag clouds abound in Devalot.

Comments

Everywhere that you can tag, you can add a comment too. Blog articles, tickets, wiki pages, everything! And just like everything else in Devalot, comment text can be transformed by Textile, Markdown, or even RDoc.

After a comment is posted, it can be edited or deleted by the author, or a site admin. Now you don’t have to post a comment a second time to fix a typo!

RSS/Atom Feeds

Instead of getting an email when a ticket changes, why not just use your news reader? News feeds are available for:

All project blog articles
Specific project blog articles
All tickets from a specific project
A specific ticket

Point Based Moderation System

New users start out with zero points, and are therefore moderated. Any content they post is invisible until a moderator approves it.

After users have enough points they can help moderate new users (kick spam bots and welcome new users).

The Dashboard

Projects are an important part of Devalot, and so are users. Each registered user has a dashboard where they can review which projects they’re a member of, and which tickets are assigned to them.

The Devalot dashboard is your high-level view of how you fit into the hosted projects.

Devalot