Question

It would be wonderful to be able to apply a "wiki-help" type link to various elements in both FogBugz and Kiln. I'm not sure how best to explain the idea so here are a few examples:

• In Kiln's project overview, providing a link to a wiki page describing the branching structure & practices for the project.

• While editing a FogBugz ticket and selecting and "area" for the ticket, providing a link to a wiki page (or section) that describes the use for each area in the system.

The idea is that while I (the FogBugz/Kiln administrator for our company) have a fairly coherent idea of how we're using these tools, despite my best efforts to clearly communicate how things are setup and which processes to use, my coworkers find that there is just too much information to learn all at once. I can document these things in a wiki but that doesn't have the convenient context of "where I'm working right now" to answer questions.

I'm thinking of the "question-mark-help-icon" you frequently find next to fields in many applications. Allowing administrators to simply add documentation to elements and users to see that documentation (or at least a convenient link to it) would provide valuable documentation.

(I'm not sure whether this would be more appropriate as a built-in feature or a plugin, so I've tagged this as both.)

Answer 1

It's an interesting idea, but it's pretty niche. Of course, if enough people vote this question up (not this answer), we can defintiely consider adding that functionality.

In the meantime, you could use something like the following BugMonkey script to accomplish what you're looking for (at least in FogBugz). Thanks to the new Kiln Glazes (In Kiln 2.4 and later), you can do this in Kiln as well:

$('label[for="ixArea"]').after('<a href="[link to your wiki documentation here]" title="Click for more info on what each area is for" target="_blank"><img style="margin: -3px 2px;" src="images/info.gif" /></a>');

This script will inject a small "info" icon next to the Area label that can open your wiki documentation in a new window:

Answer 2

I think the ability to link to "info" pages about specific things would be a great idea. Here is another use-case that came to my mind:

1. Since it is almost always a good idea to plan out a project and write specifications for the various things, being able to link the the Project's wiki page would help to encourage planning, and also help new users get up to speed on a project quickly. The same is true for milestones and areas within a project. (category too, though this tends to be more site-wide)

In general, information is more powerful if it links to other information. It will be quite a challenge to do this well without cluttering the interface, but I think that it could be done well if people put their minds to it.

My initial reaction says that this should be a plugin, since not everyone would want or need that level of integration between the case management and wiki sub-systems, especially those who use FogBugz as just a bug tracking database. But for those that use FogBugz to plan and manage projects, adding this integration would be a major boon, and would also shore up the still fairly lack-luster wiki.

So, while a plugin would be the ideal home for this added functionality so that administrators get a choice, the level of integration required to do it well means that the current plugin APIs can't quite get you everything needed to do this well. With that in mind, it would seem that this would likely need to be a FogCreek developed plugin (since they can add in the APIs they need as they need them).

Regardless of how it is done, however, I think having this level of integration would be a great leap forward for FogBugz and would add a lot of ease-of-use for those who plan and manage projects.