Redmine › Project Alias

Download Project Alias 0.1.0

The previous version of the plugin was marked “beta” as I was not sure, that it worked fine in all cases. I’m still not sure, that it does, but, at least, no one reported any serious issue. So version 0.1.0 is now considered to be stable.

Of course, the main “feature” of the plugin is support of new Redmine versions 1.4.x – 2.3.x (yeah, I did not update the plugin for a long). Yet still there are fixes, which make version 0.1.0 of the plugin better and more stable:

Thus, I got the feeling, that it was not right to allow removing previous identifiers (which have become aliases). Redmine does not allow changing project identifiers for a reason! For example, this reason can be saved URLs, which still contain an obsolete identifier. So 0.1.0 marks aliases, which have been identifiers, as undeletable.

Also I learned, that aliases (and, especially, previous identifiers) do not work in Wiki pages. This becomes a real problem, if you used an obsolete identifier in Wiki syntax, as after renaming the project identifier you would need to update all Wiki pages with such syntax! And there can be a lot of... So 0.1.0 adds support for project aliases in the Wiki syntax – i.e., you can now use aliases as active project identifiers there.

In addition, version 0.1.0 supports underscores in identifiers under ChiliProject (thanks Alexander Leisentritt for discovering this issue) and comes with Italian, Portuguese and Turkish translations (thanks user#197, user#124 and user(Ismail Sezen)#107).

The main reason for writing this plugin (despite the name) was the idea to rename my project identifiers (mainly to remove redmine-, see this news)... But for some reason I chose the wrong identifier (i.e., with redmine-) for this plugin as well. I guess I just wanted to test it! And I did... Renaming works! And the identifier of this project has been renamed. Along with it the SVN repository has been renamed... So to be able to access the SVN repository of this project you need to execute:

$ svn switch --relocate http://svn.s-andy.com/redmine-alias http://svn.s-andy.com/project-alias

Where:

• redmine-alias – old identifier.
• project-alias – new identifier.

If you want to be notified about further changes in this plugin, subscribe to this project using the form on the sidebar. Subscription (provided by my another plugin) is not the same as watching! If shortly: you can watch existing objects only and subscription notifies about new objects.

You may also need to check the Mastering Redmine project. This project is for a book about Redmine, that I have written recently.

Many of my Redmine and ChiliProject plugins changed their original ideas. Among them are - SVN Creator which now supports Git and Mercurial and therefore has been renamed into the SCM Creator, Google Ads which allows defining custom content for Redmine hooks and is to be renamed into Hooks manager etc. For all of them, as it appeared later, I chose the wrong project identifiers. And most Redmine users know that it can’t be changed...

So what’s next? Use that insufficient identifiers for historical reasons? Copy/move projects? Change the identifiers directly in the database?.. I would do the last if it did not make external links dead! That are the issues faced by many other Redmine users, as it appeared.

Well... You would not loose external links if there was a possibility to have the previous identifier as an alias so both identifiers worked at the same time. Having project identifier aliases seemed to be a good idea anyway (not sure what for else it would be useful however)... So the idea transformed into project identifier aliases with the possibility to choose the main identifier. All links with old and new identifiers work fine! But project links are generated using only the primary project identifier. For SEO the pages accessed using aliases contain <link rel="canonical" ... /> (this is what was not tested well!).

I can’t be sure it works without issues however! It does on my test Redmine! But I have not installed it on the production yet... That’s because with changed identifiers I won’t be able to access SVN repositories. At least. As a workaround I added a hook which can be used to change/fix things dependent on identifiers but I have not added support for it in the SCM creator yet... I also plan to patch Redmine.pm to add support for aliases...

So meanwhile you can help me testing it. I believe repository names is the only issue! But... You have been warned!..