View Improvements and General Feedback

[kofalt]

These are all just ideas and feedback on some initial use of the plugin. Some of these may need to be their own issues, if desired. I don't know if these are feasible or would require a lot of effort, just trying to help :)

1. The summary tab could be more exciting: that is, use some of those colorful graphs on the summary view as well, rather than or in addition to the simplified grayscale graph on top.

2. Paths on the summary and code views can be quite long. Truncating them so that they fit in the designated column length would make the views flow better.

3. Some of the top graphs, like "Total Files" and "Total Pages" are useful but represent values that are unlikely to go down significantly over time, meaning these graphs will be less & less useful. Presenting current information closer to the top may be a better choice, like commits by month on top instead.

4. Presenting commits/month for the entire lifespan of the Trac instance is useful, but it would be nice to see more recent information also. Website activity over the last month, for example.

5. Tying into 4 above, I don't know if this is feasible or not, but it would be nice to "tab" some graphs: display one graph with several tabs to change the data. Why present three separate graphs of "Commits by month, day of week, hour of day" when you could combine the three into one? I don't know if you can use AJAX or Javascript for that, or would have to reload the pages with "?status=accepted" parameters like Custom Queries do.

6. In general, a more horizontal layout would be nice. The code view in particular is several pages long, but if there's horizontal room left over on the browser, why not let things stack up into columns? I'm no web developer, but you could probably add table columns or what-not that would gracefully go back to a 1-column view if the window is too narrow.

7. Requesting these tables/graphs individually from Wiki articles would be useful. I could see a lot of people happy with the idea of a "commit activity over the last month" graph displayed on their home page, etc. This could be in the form of individual macros, like [[TotalFilesGraph]], or some central query macro, like [[GetGraph(TotalFiles)]]. This would probably be a lot of work, but could make stats usable in concise pieces rather than bombarding everything in one page.

8. Some of the tables could also be pie graphs, like "Most active wiki pages." Label the graph with the stats of the top X categories, and it would probably be more illustrative.

9. The "Commit cloud" in the Code view should have each word link to a search of commit history for that keyword. Essentially, each word in the cloud would link to "/search?q=KEYWORD&noquickjump=1&changeset=on" Probably tweak the CSS/etc so that it doesn't underline everything...

[kofalt]

Added two extra points I forgot to include.

[mrjbq7]

All good ideas and now on my list. I particularly like the use of macros for the wiki (and probably not very much work since the code can be shared).

I implemented #9 quickly to see how it feels if you'd like to try it out.

[kofalt]

Tried out 6ed4aaf and liked it! Two suggestions:

I would be tempted to make the text font normal (get rid of the underline/red coloring) and then have it bold when mouse-overed. This is more a stylistic preference, so take it or leave it as you please :) Something like this could do it:

A:link    {color: black text-decoration: none}
A:visited {color: black; text-decoration: none}
A:active  {color: red; text-decoration: none}
A:hover   {color: black; font-weight:bold}

I also noticed that search links detect words within words, EG a search for "old" generates results that have "folder" but not "old" as a whole word. That may be more Trac than your code though.

[kofalt]

You also mentioned a list of upcoming changes; have you considered adding them to the README so folks can see? Or am I blind and you've listed them somewhere already...

[chmullig]

Big ++ on #4 - adding a way to specify the time range. I know most of our staff is interested in seeing the tickets open over the past 30 days more than anything else.

[mrjbq7]

I added options to look at "last month", "last year", or "all time". You will see new gray links in the upper right. Is this more what you were thinking of?

I need to spend some time cleaning up the UI now that you can parameterize time, path, and author... and to give some love to the tickets pages.

[chmullig]

That's great, yup. One interesting thing (not bad, necessarily) is that we've closed more tickets than we opened most days this month, and as a result the opened line goes below 0 a bunch. Kinda neat, actually.