Redmine

Background/Explanation

Redmine is an excellent ticket system, and I think that it's gestures toward task and project management make it one of the best (if not the best) open-source, cross-platform project managers available. That said, the task and project management features are still kind of incomplete and glommed on to the polished ticket system. They still feel like prototype features. I'd like to work on that through plugins, but these would be my first substantive RoR projects and would me time some time to complete. So I'm submitting this as a feature request, but hope to noodle around on it myself as well.

Several years ago, a task management application called Remember The Milk (http://www.rememberthemilk.com) implemented a notation system that allowed users to create tasks with a single line of text. A task creation line could look something like this:

Pick up the milk ^tomorrow !priority #tag @location *weekly =30min http://example.com

Other task management systems adopted similar systems, many using the same notation that RTM had defined. None of these notations were required to create a task, but danged if creating tasks this way wasn't quick and just a little bit fun.

Smart Add was also very flexible and responsive: It recognized many different abbreviations for dates and times (and didn't actually require the "^" character for common date formats), used AJAX autosuggest boxes (to help avoid errors due to misspellings), and provided the ~ notation to turn the interpreter off for a particular task. (See: https://www.rememberthemilk.com/help/?ctx=basics.smartadd.whatis for a more complete explanation.)

Proposal

Smart Add, boiled down to it's essence, is just command line flags made friendlier by the use of common special characters and a set of interpreters for arguments that might exist in several different formats. There are two ways that I would like to implement this in Redmine:

1. Add inline flags and arguments to the API (with custom fields represented as "--field_name" flags), and optionally use this notation when parsing issues submitted by email.
2. Add a single-line issue creation field.

In the settings for this plugin or feature allow the user to set a default project, date, etc. for each field.

Postscript

This is something that I will be noodling around with, but as my first serious RoR project I don't expect to be able to implement it well or soon. (Some kind of annotated diagram explaining how Rails pieces together a New Issue page from different files/templates/? would be a big help!)