Collaboration

One of the Tuleap objectives is to provide developers with efficient software development and project management tools. In addition, the Tuleap site should quickly become the favorite communication channel of all users as it is pivotal for the project teams and their community of users to communicate efficiently.

To this end, Tuleap offers a series of communication services that can be customized by the project team. These include mailing lists, the News service, the Web Forums and a Instant Messaging Plug-in.

Mailing Lists

Creation

Each project can create as many mailing lists (ML) as needed. To create a mailing list click on the “Lists” item in the Project Main menu, then click on the “Admin” link in the mailing list menu bar.

Adding a ML is just a matter of giving it a name, a one-line description, and to specify whether it is a public or a private list. A private list won’t show up on the welcome screen of the Mailing List service and is therefore only known to the project team. This will prevent other people from subscribing or posting messages to it.

In order to minimize naming conflicts between the many MLs created by the various Tuleap projects, the mailing list follows the following naming pattern:

projectname-listname@SYS_LISTS_HOST

Where:

• projectname is your project short name as defined during project registration.

• listname is the name you have chosen for your mailing list.

  Note

  Creating a mailing list implies that you are the mailing list administrator, at least at the beginning. As the ML administrator, you’ll receive some additional instructions via e-mail shortly after the creation of the ML. This is an important mail message that contains the URLs for the ML administration and information pages and the default ML administration password generated by Tuleap. Keep it in a safe place!

  Tip

  A Tuleap hosted project should at least create one mailing list (or a web forum) where all users can post questions and comments. This list is typically called projectname-interest@SYS_LISTS_HOST. We strongly encourage you to follow this well established practice.

Administration

The ML administration is also entirely Web based. You can access the ML administration page by using the URL that you received when you first created the ML. In case you have misplaced the original message you can access the ML administration page at the following URL:

http://SYS_LISTS_HOST/mailman/admin/listname

The Administration page allows you to tune many ML parameters, manage list members, and administrators, privacy, new member welcome messages, etc. GNU/Mailman, the ML manager used by Tuleap, is an extremely capable software and we invite you to visit the administration page at least once to get an idea about the feature set.

Note

Note that project administrators are not automatically made administrators of project mailing lists, and the administrative password for the mailing list is distinct from any of the other Tuleap user passwords.

(Un)Subscription, Archive and Preferences

Unless its owner marks a ML as private, any Tuleap user can subscribe to a project Mailing List (ML). To subscribe to a mailing list click on the “Lists” item in the Project Main menu. From there click on the “Subscribe/Unsubscribe/Preferences” link of the appropriate ML. Then follow the instructions presented.

The Tuleap ML system (GNU/Mailman) also archives all the messages posted on a mailing list. Following the “Archive” link on the same page as before will bring you to archived messages grouped by month. Note that the current archiving software is not MIME-aware and does not support the archiving of attachments.

Global Preferences

Setting a membership maximum

Tuleap has patched Mailman so that the system forge administrators can set the maximum number of users per mailing list. This feature is disabled by default. To enable it you need console access to the Tuleap machine.

$ vi /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py

Say you want to limit the number of members to 100. Add/ edit the following lines

# Limit number of users in mailing lists.
# Possible values: integer or 'false'
LIST_MEMBER_MAX = 100

Then restart the service

$ systemctl restart mailman

This will limit the number of people who can be subscribed to the mailing lists using the mass-import functionality of Mailman. However, it will not prevent members from subscribing one-by-one via the interface or directly through the mailing list.

News Service

The News service complements your mailing lists. This service allows you to publish pieces of news related to your project. Any event in the life of your project is a good candidate for a news release: new people in the team, new software release, information on related technologies and why not your wedding announcement or the birth of your sixth child ? . Do not keep your project concealed behind a veil. Make your project life public for the benefit of all employees and for your faithful community of users.

News publishing is very easy. Simply click on the “News” item in the Project Main menu and then on the “Submit” link in the News Service menu at the top of the page. From there type the title of the news and its text body. You can type URLs in the body. Tuleap will detect them and transform them into a hyperlink in the published version. You can also choose whether you want the news to be public this means visible on your Project Dashboard for all Tuleap users or private which means visible for your project members only.

Any Tuleap visitor can attach a follow-up comment to the news visible for her on your project page making each piece of news a potential forum of discussion [1]. In addition the Tuleap Team sees all the public news published by all Tuleap projects and can decide that a project news is worth publishing on the Tuleap front page. A big splash indeed!! When submitting a news, you can request a promotion for the Tuleap front page to the administrator.

Web Forums

This is the third form of communication offered by Tuleap. Web Forums are more or less equivalent to mailing list except that the message-posting takes place via a Web interface rather than email. Therefore you need to have a connection to the site to participate in the discussion because you can’t prepare your message off-line, as you can with an ML.

To access the Web Forums of a Tuleap project, click on the “Forums” item in the Project Main menu. When a Tuleap project is created, it is given three Web forums: Open Discussions, Help and Developers. These Forums and all others are open to all Tuleap users both for reading and posting unless you decide to make them private (see below). A user can also decide to monitor a Web Forum. Monitoring a Forum will cause Tuleap to automatically forward all the posted messages via e- mail thus avoiding repeated visits to the Forum Web page.

Project administrators can create other Forums on demand by using the Forum Administration module that can be accessed via the “Admin” link in the News Service menu. Administrators can follow the links on this page to Add Forum, Delete Message, and Update Forum Info/Status. The Update Forum Info/Status page lets administrators make forums public or private, edit the name and description of the forum, or even delete the forum.

[1]

Behind the scene, each piece of news is actually managed exactly like a Tuleap Web Forum.