Over the years I’ve had to make programs do what they were never designed to, like using Excel as a database or using Access as a database. I’ve been working on a little project (not an Excel or Access database) that I want to be able to publicly track bugs on. I don’t really want to set up a whole new web app, and I would like to integrate it with my blog (where I will eventually be putting aforementioned project).

After unsuccessfully trying to find a plugin that might do the whole thing I wondered if I was making it too complex. While waiting for my bus this morning I had a thought. Why not just use wordpress as it is?

This led me to think about what I wanted from my bug tracking. Basically I wanted the ability to:

• Create bugs. How about a post being a bug?
• Comment on bugs. Posts can have comments!
• Mark a bug for a certain version and product. Posts can have categories
• Show that a bug is active, complete, won’t fix, etc. Posts can have tags

To get bugs from other people, I could have a dedicated “triage” page that takes comments and I manually create bug posts from them (I’m looking for a plugin that will let me take a comment and turn it into a post).

Of course I don’t want the bugs littering my front page, or main feed, but I have been able to find a plugin that should deal with that issue. I am worried about polluting my tag cloud with bug related tags, but that is a compromise I’m willing to make.

Of course, I probably should focus on finishing that other project first so there is something to raise bugs about.