Tuleap Overview

Main Menu

The Tuleap main menu is a permanent piece of information that you’ll always see on your screen wherever you are in the Tuleap site. Its content can vary according to where you and who you are. In other words it is context sensitive. Let’s take 2 examples:

• If you are visiting the Tuleap site as an anonymous user the upper part of the menu invites you to login or to create a new account whereas if you are logged in you’ll be given access to other functions like Logout, Account Maintenance, Personal Page, etc.
• Similarly if you decide to visit a given project hosted on Tuleap, the menu at the top of the screen will also show you the list of services available for this project.

In the rest of this section we only review those items that are permanent and context independent. Other menu items are described later in the document in the related service description.

Tuleap Web Page Flow Chart

Software Map (or Project Tree)

The Software Map is a pivotal service in Tuleap that you can (should) use to determine if there are some pieces of software that you can re-use for your own work. The Software Map is one of the 2 ways by which you can search for existing software projects. The other one relies on the Search Facility.

Software Map sample browsing

When a project is created it is classified by the project creator according to 7 criteria:

• Development Status: How mature your project is (alpha, beta, stable,…)
• Environment: in which environment your software is being used (Web, Win32, X Window, text mode,…)
• Audience: The target audience of your software (developers, end-users, system administrators,…)
• License: License of your software. In most cases this is going to be the SYS_ORG_NAME Code exchange Policy
• Operating System: Operating system(s) your software runs on
• Programming Languages: the programming languages you used to develop your software
• Topic: The field of use of your project. This criteria describes the area in which your software operates (Printing, Scanning, Information Technology,…)

Each criterion can have up to 3 values for a given project (e.g. you can select up to 3 programming languages for a given project). Values of the various criteria are taken from a list of predefined values defined by the site administrator. The “Topic” criterion reflects the domain covered by your project (Printing, Scanning, Information Technology, etc.) and it follows a hierarchy of domains and sub-domains that the Tuleap Team constantly refines as more projects are coming.

Using the Software Map you can browse Tuleap hosted projects according to any of these criteria. As you explore the map, projects matching the criteria are listed on the screen with their name, description, creation date, activity percentile, and other information. The values of the 7 criteria for a given project are listed right after the project name and description. Notice that next to each criteria value is a [Filter] hyperlink. Clicking on any of these filters will result in restricting the project list to those that match the filter. Tuleap project templates or test projects (see Project Type) are not listed in the Software Map.

A Software Map browsing sample is shown on Software Map sample browsing. In this example, the user has first opened the Programming Languages Criteria and then selected C as a language of choice. This probably led to a large number of projects and so she then decided to narrow the set of projects by specifying 2 additional filters: the first one specifies that the Development Status must be Production-Stable and the second one requires that the projects runs on the SunOS/Solaris operating system.

As a result of this multi-criteria screening, the user ends up with a list of 9 projects (only the first one is shown on Software Map sample browsing to save space). Filters have another interesting property: they are sticky. It means that if you decide to browse the projects from another angle (say by opening the Topic folder), the selected filters will constantly apply. In order to release the search constraint you must explicitly remove the filter by clicking on the [Remove this Filter] link in the upper part of the screen.

Tip

If you repeatedly execute the same browsing operation on the Software Map you can save it in your Personal Page. To do this, first execute your software map request as explained above and when you are happy with the selection criteria, click on the Bookmark This Page item in the Tuleap Main Menu. This will make a new link appear in your Personal Page that you can then edit to give it an appropriate description.

Help

Help Index

Tuleap comes with a comprehensive User Guide that fully describes all the Tuleap tools and services. A click on the “Help Index” link will direct you to the table of content of the Tuleap User Guide. The same user guide is used throughout the Tuleap site in the “Help” links that you’ll find in almost every menu appearing on Tuleap.

Site Documentation

The “Site Documentation” pointer is the entry point to the Tuleap documentation. The Tuleap documentation is entirely managed via the Document Manager service of the Administration project, which is of course hosted on Tuleap. The documents on this page cover all the Tuleap site. It includes presentation material, the user guide and other important documents. Read them carefully.

Tuleap Developers Channels

One of the top priority objectives of the Tuleap site is to become a discussion forum for the software developers regardless of the organization they belong to and the country they work in.

To this end the Tuleap Team has created a series of mailing lists (called Developers Channels) where anybody, including non-Tuleap users, can subscribe. Each channel is dedicated to a given software related topic. The creation of a new channel is under the responsibility of the Tuleap Team.

The Developers Channels managed on Tuleap offer a number of interesting features:

• Subscription and Un-subscription are entirely user driven and it can be done through the Tuleap Web interface without any assistance.
• All messages posted to the channel are archived forever and can be browsed at any time. (In the future they will probably be searchable as well).
• Subscribers can decide to receive digests from the mailing list rather than individual messages.

Tuleap Discussion Forums

Discussion Forums are an alternate way to keep in touch with the Tuleap community. The Tuleap Discussion Forums were created primarily as a communication vehicle between the Tuleap users and the Tuleap Team. These are general purpose Forums where you can ask for Help with Tuleap, suggest new features, new categories for the software map, etc.

These Forums are entirely Web based which means that you have to use the Tuleap Web interface to post and read user messages. However Forums also offer the ability to be monitored, which means that all traffic will be sent to you via e-mail.

Contact Us

In addition to the Discussion Forums, you can always use the “Contact Us” link to get in touch with the Tuleap Team.

Do not hesitate to bug the “Contact Us” link. We are here to help.

Search area

Tuleap allows you to search almost any piece of Tuleap information through a keyword search mechanism. When you are on the Tuleap Home Page you can search for keywords in the following resources:

• Software Projects: a match is attempted with project names as well as their short and long description. This search mechanism is very complementary with the Software Map (see Software Map (or Project Tree)). Notice that a private project will never appear as a search result.
• People: keywords will be searched in the Tuleap user database and matched against the user’s login name, real name and e-mail address.
• Wiki: Wiki is a collaborative authoring tool (see Wiki). You can perform a full text search by keywords in wikis.
• This tracker: If you enter any tracker in any Tuleap project, the “This Tracker” item will show up in the search box, allowing you to actually search this tracker database.

News and activity streams

Tuleap homepage is a sort of a fish-eye view of the global Tuleap activity. Several indicators are available:

• Statistics: give the total number of hosted projects (excluding those that have a private status, as well as template and test projects), the total number of registered users, the total number of software packages downloaded and the total number of Web pages browsed by Tuleap users since the site opening.
• Latest News: these are the last news of the hosted projects on the forge. Project members wants to share with you their work and keep you informed. Don’t hesitate to do so!
• Newest Releases: shows a list of the most recent software releases (also known as new versions) that have been posted on the Tuleap site by the various projects. If you want to keep aware of new incoming releases visit this page on a regular basis. Tuleap also allows you to monitor the new software releases posted by a given project. To do so go to the Project Dashboard of this project by clicking on the project title and then select the monitor icon () next to the release name. Once you monitor a project release, e-mail notification will be sent to you whenever the project team posts a new software release.
• Newest Projects: the last 10 registered projects. Looking at this part of the dashboard on a regular basis will help you to keep informed on the new projects hosted on Tuleap.

We advise you to visit the Tuleap Home Page on a regular basis for it gives you an excellent idea of what is going on in terms of software development across SYS_ORG_NAME.

Bookmark This Page: Make Tuleap your browser home page :-)