After some testing and setup we have decided to use Eventum for our support ticketing needs. This featureful system will be in use for all of your support questions related to Kontrollbase – the MySQL analytics and performance tuning web application, as well as Kontrollkit – the collection of server automation scripts. You can read [...]

Harry, thanks for the praise for Eventum. This is mainly the result of my work and Bryan Alsdorf at MySQL, even though I’m no longer with MySQL AB anymore. We do agree with you on the aspects of making the page controllers as simple as possible, and also trying to let the code be as simple as possible, but still easy to maintain and change.

For some of its technical weaknesses such as the use of HTTP_GET_VARS and etc, there is a reason for this. Eventum was initially supposed to be a commercial product, and I wanted to sell commercial licenses of this application, to be then installed at the customer’s server. I tried to make the installation process as easy as possible (and it still is one of the easiest web applications to install around), and that meant working with whatever PHP …

We released 1.6.1 last friday with these changes:

- Fixed the installation procedure to add the INDEX privilege to the MySQL user (João)
- Fixed bug with handling HTML characters in Internal FAQ entries (Bryan)
- Fixed bug displaying priority in current filters (Bryan)
- Added feature to set X-Eventum-Type header in new assignment email (Bryan)
- Fixed bug that allowed users to access attachments, custom fields, phone calls and time tracking from issues they did not have access too (Bryan)
- Added new workflow method to check if an address should be emailed (Bryan)
- Fixed the issue searching routine to properly handle disabled fulltext search and customer integration features (João)
- Improved the IRC Bot script to be easier to configure (João)
- Added feature to update issue assignment, status and release for multiple issues at the same (Bryan)
- Fixed labels on …

I was busy last week with meetings in Cupertino, but Adam Donnison wrote me to tell me about the work he did to provide some integration between the two systems. I personally never tried dotProject myself, but for those interested, here is the email from Adam:

It provides the backend for Eventum using Companies and Contacts
within dotProject, and provides a reciprocal view-only listing
of open issues for dotProject users.

It does require the latest CVS version of dotProject (or more
correctly the classes/query.class.php from the latest CVS) to
provide the multi-db query support.

URL is:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=70930&package_id=159274&release_id=345568 …

Go get it here.

A few security problems were found on previous releases, so upgrade as soon as possible.

Eventum has a feature to provide RSS feeds of custom filters, which is basically a way to save advanced search parameters into a special URL that you can call out to check on results. Pretty useful feature, and a lot of people use that. However, we can’t simply have an open window into a potential confidential database of issues/bugs/tickets, so the RSS feed script authenticates the user with HTTP Auth, with the usual PHP way of doing things:

<?php
if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'])) {
header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="My Realm"');
header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
echo 'Text to send if user hits Cancel button';
exit;
} else {
echo "Hello {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']}.";
echo "You entered {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']} as your password.";
}
?>

Everything …

Back when Eventum was still a commercial product of mine, I tried to create some banner ads to try to promote the product. I just found some old copies lying around on my web server:

And some vertical banners that I would use on my weblog:

Isn’t that adorable?

So here’s the deal: Outlook 2003 doesn’t include the Message-ID header if you are sending email through a mail server other than Microsoft Exchange. There are other rants about this:

1. from Peter Pentchev
2. from Terry Frazier

And they both point to this priceless news bulletin, which contains this gem:

According to Mark, Microsoft apparently had a few complaints from people using Outlook that their machine name was “leaked” in the Message-ID header. Instead of ignoring the complaint or making the host name used in the Message-ID header configurable, Microsoft chose to remove the Message-ID header.

Technically, Outlook 2003 …

I had no idea about this, until I noticed a new section on our Wiki page that describes the installation notes for FreeBSD:

You can alternatively take the easy way and install Eventum from FreeBSD’s ports collection. At first, you need to update your ports collection using cvsup (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html). Once you updated your ports directory, use: cd /usr/ports/www/eventum && make install clean

Pretty cool

I love how Richard Heyes’ Application Structure post which describes his way of layint out PHP applications is similar to my own personal structure. I have been using something very similar for a few years now, which evolved by working with PHP applications and dealing with problems and how to avoid them in the future, so it’s amusing to see two people come up with something so similar.

I basically agree with the way he separates library code from normal PHP scripts that are available to the Web, but I do things a bit different. I use the following directory structure:

application root
  |
  +- crons
  +- include
  |    +- jpgraph
  |    +- pear
  |    +- Smarty
  +- locks
  +- logs
  +- scripts
  +- setup
  +- templates
  +- templates_c
  +- webroot
       +- css
       +- images
       +- js

Explanation:

• …