More on custom fields

[Jake]

Paulo Casanova wrote:

> Phase 3: IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
> 1. Now that we know what we're going to do, let's try to divide the 
> work into separate phases. Let's try to get a few basic things in BZ. 
> Personally, I think this should not go in as a "whole" patch in once 
> but little by little... we should not try to align our plan with BZ's 
> release plans. Each phase should end with an accepted path into BZ.
>
I know I'm kinda jumping the gun here by responding to a phase 3 issue 
when we're still at phase 0, but it's kinda related phase 1 (I mean, I 
am just thinking :). It seems to me that implementing this is parts is, 
in fact, the way to go. My suggestion would be to first have a way to 
duplicate the status_whiteboard. Simply give administrators a way to add 
more free form text boxes. While this is far less than what the average 
person who wants custom fields desires, it will take quite a bit of work 
to get to that point and it is a huge step in the direction of 
fulfilling their desire. We could then even replace the 
status_whiteboard and simply make it a pre-configured custom field.

After that was done and working well (little to no performance hit, not 
terribly complicated to add a field, etc), it should be relatively easy 
to add other types of simple fields (eg, enums, etc).

Just my $0.02 :)