For a while I’ve been wanting to improve the bug (and enhancements) tracking for my WordPress plugins. Right now I rely noting down my ideas and any suggestions that people have made and looking at that whenever I’m working on a plugin.

Now, though, I’ve installed MantisBT – a free PHP based bug tracking system. I’ve installed it on domain, configured it up and I’m in the process of adding content – my Simple Social Bookmarks is the guinea pig.

Anyone can view it, but I wanted tighter integration with this site. Plugins exist to do this but they rely on using a SOAP interface – my host doesn’t have this installed, so I can’t use it. Instead I’ve written my own code that directly accesses the MySQL database – and very well it works too. On the bottom of the plugin pages on this site are two new sections – Known Bugs and Planned Enhancements. Under each are listed any entries from the MantisBT database relevant to that category, as well as a link to the roadmap.

Before you go looking for this, it isn’t yet visible, as it’s part of the site revamp that I’m working on.

Right now, I don’t intend to release this as a plugin, but if there’s enough interest I may do.