Hullo,

At work I have made web based system that we use to store various bits of information. Because I've built in in stages with odd requirements and little knowledge about what I've been doing, it's very much cobbled together and certainly does things that make me cringe, but have been done for ease and speed of deployment (not necessarily support).

We currently have two 'mini sites', one that logs 'defects' or 'jobs' for each unit in the fleet of trains, and one that logs 'call outs' for when we do support work.
A defect is attributed to a unit, and is either open or closed, and most fields are editable.
A call is not editable and when submitted, causes an email to be sent to a group of people.
Every morning a number of reports are generated and sent out to various people.

The problems at the moment is that I am the only person who can make reports (current skills needed are SSH, command line text editing, HTML, PHP, Cron) and we need new reports making and old ones deleting every few months (as modification jobs get started and completed).

I'm thinking about redesigning it all, and rather than using MySQL, HTML, and PHP, I'm thinking I should use something that will make it better structured.
I thought Ruby on Rails would potentially be a good idea. I did some stuff in uni and hated it, but I'd make another go of it. Perl Catalyst is another system that I'd like to use, but last time I tried the documentation just wasn't up to scratch.
A web based solution is good because it's cross platform and accessible from anywhere.

Does anyone know of another system? One that might be a bit more drag and drop, or doesn't have such a steep learning curve as learning a new language and framework?

Many thanks,
Ben

something like bugzilla comes to mind as "similar" it might be worth a look.

We wrote our own internal one, we can allocate times against items (and are introducing the ability to directly add these to time sheets)
It's a LOT of work, but we get some pretty nice benefits, like we generate a daily report of time spent on tasks so managers know what is worked on

As mentioned bugzilla is a decent one

Others include
YouTrack (more .Net orientated if you wanted to extend it)
TFS (same, but also encompasses source control either through the TFS mechanism or IIRC, Git)
Bugtracker.Net
Zentrack

Only experience of YouTrack and our own in house really though

I'm a bit pissed, but wouldn't one of the many open source job ticketing systems do what you want?

PHP (post 4) allows you to make very good, structured and object orientated sites, IF YOU WANT TO.

Like most so called OO languages that have grown out of 3G languages (C++ et al), you can easily abuse the OO structures to make slap dash systems.

I used PHP with the Zend Framework to generate an object orientated system with a MySQL backend. It was very quick to develop on. The complete system (article tracking system for a photo studio photographing thousands of articles a week for different customers, from goods inwards, through storage, preparation (ironing of clothing, for example), to photo shoot, back to storage, photo approval and finally goods outwards) took a couple of months with just me programming it (about 80,000 lines of code in total) and documentation.

The important parts were planning which objects I needed and documenting the objects properly before I started writing any code. Using PHPDOC, I auto generated all the code documentation, interface description etc. in a 400 page Word document. It was fast and easy.

As a finished system, Redmine comes to mind. It has ticketing and project management built in.

Thanks for the options all

I'm going to go away and have a bit of a play. Everyone seems happy enough with the system at the moment, but I'm conscious that it might not be long before the system falls over and I need to do something serious with it.