[rt-users] Productizer: simple CGI allowing non-members to submit to queue

[arclight at jump.net]

Hi,

I got bored today and modified my as-yet-unreleased Productizer 
CGI to route mail into RT.

Here's the archive suitable for ./contrib (maybe):

http://www1.jump.net/~arclight/projects/rt/productizer-20000905-
00.tar.gz

The Story:

Once upon a time I got tired of interrogating engineers and product 
managers trying to figure out what was required to launch whatever 
products they were putting together. Invariably I'd forget something 
and have to chase people down, or worse yet, I'd have to track 
down and compile 5-10 emails on the subject (like piecing together 
a crashed airliner) to understand the essentials of their product.

Hence, the Productizer was born. You put all your questions in a 
config file, the form is generated on the fly, people fill it in, and it 
writes an HTML summary file of what they entered with a little 
commentary. I intended that it make some intelligent suggestions 
about hardware purchasing, etc. but I never got around to it. This 
was built before we started using RT.

As I said, I got bored today so I added text reporting and SMTP to 
the Productizer and now it funnels mail into RT.

The nice thing about the Productizer is that the questions it asks 
are all stored in a single config file. It's not rocket science but it 
works fairly well. So, should you want to use Productizer as a 
specialized UI for submitting requests to RT, it's a matter of 
changing a config file, not hacking on a lot of perl.

One more bit of trivia: this was built during one of my forays into 
Literate Programming so the One True Source file may look a bit 
weird to those unfamiliar with LP (it's designed to processed with 
pqtangle (included) and noweb (untested)). See the README file 
for more info and rantage. Apologies for the README; I attribute it 
to having more Guinness than sleep :)

Let me know what you think,

-- Bob