Hacking on the Bugzilla User Interface (was Re: Hi Myk)

[Myk Melez]

Hi Diego,

I'm the project owner for Bugxula as well as the component owner for the 
User Interface component of Bugzilla.  Help in redesigning Bugzilla 
pages and implementing those designs is always welcome, as is work on 
the user interface of Bugxula.

The best way to help on Bugzilla is to look at the User Interface 
component to see what bugs have been reported about the UI, choose some 
bugs to fix, file new bug reports if there aren't existing ones for the 
pages you want to redesign, and then get started:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW,ASSIGNED,REOPENED&product=Bugzilla&component=User%20Interface

Note that there's a lot of history to the Bugzilla interface, and there 
are also many redesigns that have been begun but never finished, so 
there's a lot of good material to be mined and that you can build your 
redesigns upon.  I strongly recommend reading the existing bug reports 
and building your designs upon the work that has already been done so 
far rather than starting from scratch with a completely new look.

Note also that while designs are useful, implementations are even 
better, so designs you can actually implement and submit as patches 
against the Bugzilla source code will stand a much better chance of 
succeeding than designs you provide as drawings and descriptions.

Finally, note that Bugzilla is used day in and day out by thousands of 
people to get essential work done.  It's also used by tens of thousands 
of people to report and track the occasional bug.  It's a productivity 
application to many people, but it's also an itinerant app that many 
people use only occasionally.  It has to satisfy both masters to the 
degree possible (productivity users have priority in conflicts), and the 
focus for both is usability.

To that end, standards support and prettiness is valuable but not the 
primary criterion for determining what does and doesn't go in, so if 
your goal is to make Bugzilla a shining example of a standards-based 
application, you can certainly do that for the most part, but any drive 
to make it 100%-compliant is likely to fail, as we intend to use 
whatever technologies, standard or not, to deliver the best possible 
experience for our users.  Prettiness, likewise, is nice, but it isn't 
the most important thing, and usability has priority over it.

As for Bugxula, it doesn't sound like what you are interested in, but if 
it does interest you, then your expertise and experience would be 
welcome there too.  Let me know if that's something you want to do, and 
I'll help you get set up to contribute there as well.

Thanks for emailing.  I appreciate your enthusiasm for making Bugzilla 
better and look forward to seeing what you have to offer!

-myk

cc:ing the Bugzilla developers list, which has other folks on it who are 
interested in such things.

p.s. Note that Bugzilla has already been translated into Spanish.


Diego Martín Lafuente wrote:

> I mail you to talk about what i want to do for mozilla products.
>
> I am an experienced webdeveloper/moz evangelist and pro standards, and 
> i saw bugzilla some time ago as a good tool, i didn't noticed bugzilla 
> was being in constant development so i've went back there and see 
> what's goin on.
>
> To be short, as a IA / GUI designer i want to colaborate making 
> bugzilla an atracctive and useful tool, what i mean is re-model the 
> bugzilla look and feel and making better accesibility, markup and 
> semantic stuff.
>
> So to starting this i decided to mount a new project on the mozdev.org 
> website, wich they told me to ask you to collaborate on bugxula, but 
> my intention is not to remodel bugzilla on xul, my intention is make 
> hacks on the actual code, wich is displayed on XHTML / CSS, and some 
> ordering stuff i believe it could help for companies who wants to use 
> bugzilla.
>
> I would like to read your answer and see what can i do or what do you 
> recommend i should do for collaborating. I have no problems to start 
> making XUL for bugxula but i would like to make improbements to actual 
> bugzilla look and feel.
>
> Regards and thanks for time reading this.
>
>
>
>
> Diego Martin Lafuente.
> -------------------------------------
> http://www.minid.net
> http://www.minid.net/utilidades/mozilla/
> http://www.minid.net/utilidades/firebird/
>
>
>
> BTW: My main language is Spanish, i was considering to translate 
> bugzilla to spanish and catalan, it could be good too and good for the 
> spanish community.
>
> cheers.
>