Welcome to the first edition of Feature Request Spotlight! As you may recall from one of my early write-ups, I proposed a regular segment where I’d showcase a unique idea submitted by the community. By presenting this in a separate venue, I hope to attract fresh eyes to a feature request that was inevitably buried in an avalanche of bugs. Not everyone reads JIRA on a regular basis and some may not know how to use it effectively to begin with.

My goal is simple: Find an interesting request, present it here, and build up a new audience that may have missed it the first time around. There’s no hard or fast rules to picking an idea out of a hat, but ideally the choice should fit a number of criteria:

1. The idea is both unique and undeniably useful to the target audience.
2. The idea is something our developers consider a viable option. Something that can be done without creating a whole new application!
3. The idea was overlooked. I don’t want to pitch a feature request that already has 20 votes, 15 watchers and 10 comments. I want it to be an idea that despite sitting in the Wishlist queue for months it still has no community following.

Fortunately CHD-805 fits this criteria perfectly! According to JIRA, todd999 from our forums suggested we re-tool the Forum Explorer to be a team-based RSS reader. RSS Explorer, perhaps? Rather than try to summarize his masterfully written idea, here’s the details straight from the issue’s page:

Expand Forum Explorer to monitor any RSS feeds

Summary:

After looking at the new Forum monitoring in v4 I think that Cerb could be turned into the best team RSS reader system in the world.

Think about how you could have an entire TEAM monitor and comment on a set of RSS feeds too big for any one person. Never worry that 3 people are wasting time on the same story at the same time, I read it and if I need to comment and share I can, if not just close it and no one else needs to bother with it. You could use “mail rules” to filter the feed and assign items to a person or team for review.

-todd999

Sounds awesome, right?! Not only is this a unique and powerful feature (1) but our lead developer loved the idea, saying it was more than doable (2). And even though I submitted the request to JIRA only a short while ago, the idea was originally posted in the forums over 6 months ago! We’d hate to admit it, but WGM even lost track of it in the shuffle (3). If that doesn’t qualify as overlooked than I don’t know what does :)

The fact that CHD-805 still only has 1 vote and 0 comments seals the deal — this is the quintessential feature to kick off our Spotlight!

So please, if the thought of a full-blown group RSS reader in Cerb4 is even slightly interesting to you, click on issue CHD-805 and vote.

Don’t know how to vote? Read the last paragraph here.

-joegeck@wgm