One of the things I’ve seen more and more when working with other developers is a sprawling variation in the organizational and presentational structure of Issue tags in projects. Issue tags are one of those little procrasta-tools in Github Issues which you could play with for hours, creating your own labeling system, setting out a colour system that’s just right, before any actual work has even been done.
If you’re someone who enjoys working with Github Issues - and I know I am - you’ll appreciate how being able to tag issues according to their type, priority, complexity, cost or subject area make searching through a seemingly endless list of tasks easier and more intuitive.
It’s not possible to create a single collection of tags that work against every project, as every project has a different scope and set of priorities. The default Issue tags leave a lot to be desired, and most programmers and project managers aren’t known for their superior colour theory skills.
I’ve had an idea for a site for a while now that runs in a similar vein to COLOURlovers or Adobe Kuler. It’s a site which allows people to easily adopt pre-packaged Issue naming schemes and colour themes that cater to their projects. People can also create and upload their own issue schemes for others to use - it would be interesting to track what schemes rise to the top.
I’ve recently read through a fantastic book called Execute by Drew Wilson and Josh Long, which they were able to write in three days and had published to print just five days after that. It’s a pretty inspiring and beautifully made book, and in the authors footsteps I’m going to see how quickly I can produce a web app of similar build quality with openness and community at the core.
I’ve drafted up a very brief spec of what I’d like to do so far:
Hosting - Heroku, Appfog or Nodejitsu (something that’s Node.js and has an open source or free option)
Database - CouchDB (I read good things about it)
Creators Login With Github - this allows for creative attribution to the theme’s original creator, and we can add profile information about the author to a theme’s page.
Be As Static As Possible - I like the idea of working with simple JSON files to store different themes. That’s why I’m choosing to use CouchDB. It’s also because I’m not much of a back-end guy yet, so being able to work with JSON files throughout and Javascript calls to the DB are a big plus.
Data Export - Although there is ability to import Issue tag schemes into Github (not yet anyway) I feel it’s important to allow people to export the data that makes up the theme, either back out as the JSON file, or as a text file of some sort.
Theme Previews - Preview each tag like it were in Github - different lightness values will influence whether the text colour of the issue tag is dark or light, so a preview option is important.
MVC - I also want to build the app using AngularJS as a front-end MVC framework, with Express mirroring the back-end. Despite needing to tweak express a little bit to work with Angular, I think it’s a fairly sensible move.
Responsive - Because it’s 2013.
Copying colour codes needs to be as easy as possible
I’d appreciate any feedback or ideas if you’re interested in getting involved, or if you’ve had any quibbles with keeping your Issue system clean and tidy. Comments are below :)
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