Trac updates and a design refresh 

Every few months we make a few improvements to Trac. Given how many hours so many of us spend on there, even the smallest changes can make a big difference. Today, a few new changes were deployed.

The first thing you’ll notice is a design refresh, from @helenyhou and @ocean90. It cools down the colors a bit and places more of our own mark on it (more WP-like, less Trac-y). They also added responsiveness for mobile devices, and made some adjustments to improve readability. See #18211. If you notice any bugs or quirks, please leave a comment there.

From @iammattthomas, the WordPress logo is now HiDPI.

If you’re a bug gardener (i.e. you can change milestones, etc.), you can now change the resolution of a closed ticket. This should make @sergeybiryukov happy — no more re-open to re-close.

Over the last few weeks I’ve given more than a dozen people bug gardener status. We’d like to empower the people we know and trust to make decisions, while making Trac simpler for others.

For those who aren’t bug gardeners, we’re trying to make it as easy and streamlined as possible for you to create and contribute to tickets. @bpetty has been studying our workflow and recommending changes. One of those is we’ve hidden the ability to change ownership of a ticket (accept/assign/reviewing). A big issue with ownership is it sometimes discourages others from contributing. I hope this change can free us up to using that field for tracking responsibility and accountability.

Non-gardeners can also no longer label tickets a “task”. Also, once the Version field is set, a user can’t update the field to a newer version, only an older one. (As @sergeybiryukov says, “version number indicates when the bug was initially introduced/reported.” It’s the earliest known affected version for a bug, or the earliest applicable version for an enhancement.)

And finally, if you add the “has-patch” keyword to a ticket, “needs-patch” will automatically be removed, and vice versa. (It’s the little things.)

I hope you enjoy this round of changes. If you have any further suggestions, please share in the comments.

Bonus. A few weeks ago, we added a ticket graph, inspired by jQuery and using their plugin as a base. I hope to add some more functionality to this in the future. For now, a few of us are using it to study trends and come up with some new ideas for how we can best maintain the ticket queues.