Eventum is an open source issue/bug tracking system that started as a commercial product in 2002. It has a small team of developers and uses other open source components like PEAR. Key features include project management, reminders, email integration, custom fields, and APIs to integrate with other tools. The document outlines Eventum's structure and available features, and discusses future plans like improved documentation and internationalization.

1. Eventum Issue/Bug Tracking System
June 2nd, 2005
João Prado Maia
Senior Software Engineer
MySQL Inc.
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2. Eventum as a Product
• Started out as a commercial product
– Developed since mid-2002
• Released as a GPL project on June of 2004
• 2 full time developers behind it, and a few contributors that send
patches from time to time
• Uses a set of PEAR components for most of the functionality, such as
database abstraction, date handling, XML-RPC web services,
SMTP/IMAP integration, etc
• Uses Smarty as the template system
• Current release is 1.5.3, almost ready to release 1.5.4
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3. Available Features
• Easy to install and configure
– Should be good to go within 10 minutes
• Reminder system
• Customer integration API
• Workflow API
• Email routing (issue-1234@domain.com)
• IMAP integration
• XML-RPC interface
– Command-line tool
• CVS / Subversion integration
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4. Available Features, cont.
• Customizable project attributes
– Statuses
– Categories
– Releases
– Priorities
• Custom fields
• Time tracking
• Canned email responses
• Link filters
• IRC Notifications
• High quality code, fully documented and nitpicked to death
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5. Overall Structure
• Projects
– Project specific attributes (categories, priorities, statuses, etc)
– Users (different permission levels per project)
– Issue entries
• May be associated with a customer
• Notes
• Email drafts
• SCM changesets
• Attached files
• Time tracking entries
• Phone calls
• Custom fields
– Email accounts
• Email entries
– May be associated with an issue
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6. Reminder System
• Create totally custom reminders based on issues, customers or even
support levels (or even by priorities)
• Example:
– Reminder “Example Corp. Issues”
• Action rank #1: “Send email if pending for one hour”
– Condition: “Status field ‘equals to’ Pending”
– Condition: “Created date field ‘greater than’ 1 hour”
• Action rank #2: “Send SMS if pending for 6 hours”
– Condition: “Status field ‘equals to’ Pending”
– Condition: “Created date field ‘greater than’ 6 hours”
• Ranking escalation avoids the same reminder action from being
triggered a second time
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7. Email Routing Interface
• Track all email communication by seamlessly re-writing outgoing emails
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8. IMAP / POP3 Integration
• Integration with IMAP or POP3 mailboxes
• Handles an existing support@domain.com mailbox pretty easily
• Auto-creation of issues
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9. Custom Fields
• If there’s a missing field in Eventum, you can create a new one
• New custom backend implementation coming soon
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10. Customer Integration API
• API allows Eventum to integrate with third-party CRM tools
• Customer entity
– Contract entity (associated with a support level)
• Allowed technical contacts (restrict who may have access to Eventum)
• Each customer contact only sees the issues associated with his own
company
• Abstract class can be extended to implement a custom customer API
backend
• Example backend is already provided with a simple array of allowed
customers and contacts
– Use this as a guide for your own backend implementation
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11. Workflow API
• Allows you to create hooks to be called when a particular event
happens
– Issue is created or updated
– Emails is associated to an issue
– Issue is assigned to another user
– Issue priority is changed
– Issue is closed
– etc
• Very convenient since your personal workflow always needs to be
customized in some small way
• Different projects may use different workflow backends
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12. XML-RPC Interface
• Mainly used right now by the command-line tool, but available for other
novel ideas
• Available commands
– Display issue details
– List and view emails, notes and drafts
– List and download files
– Update issue status
– Adding time tracking information
• Practical problem – slow with interactive services
– Maybe switch to a REST interface?
– Bryan’s upcoming optimization fixes will alleviate this somewhat
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13. Real Life Usage
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14. Future Roadmap
• Improve the phpDocumentor compatibility on the code documentation
– Add missing @package tags
• More marketing about the project
– Expand the Wiki with more documentation
– Create video demonstrations so people can visually see how Eventum
works
– Setup a demonstration installation of Eventum
• Eventum 2.0
– Implement an i18n infrastructure so community members can translate Eventum into
other languages (quite a few community requests for this)
– Improve the directory structure
– Improve the Unicode handling
• Detailed Roadmap at http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap
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15. Getting Involved / Thank You
• IRC channel available at irc.freenode.net, #eventum
• Contribute documentation at the Eventum Wiki
• Send feedback to the mailing lists
– eventum-users / eventum-users@lists.mysql.com
– eventum-devel / eventum-devel@lists.mysql.com
• Contribute patches
• Download Eventum at: http://mysql.com/eventum/
• Eventum Wiki available at: http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/
• Eventum source Javadoc-style documentation available at:
http://eventum.mysql.org/phpdoc/
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