How to report issues and bugs in Umbraco

Umbraco V7 has a completely rebuilt look and feel for the admin area. Being a ground up rebuild its to be expected that there will be the odd issue here and there. We've been doing our bit to report these so the Core team can fix them and make Umbraco even more awesome to use. There is a nice tip for reporting bugs/issues quickly.

You can report any issues at the Umbraco issue tracker (http://issues.umbraco.org/). You'll need a login so create an account, its nice and quick and a one time thing.

Now we can install a bookmarklet to make reporting issues ease. A bookmarklet is a snippet of code you can run from within your browser by clicking a button on your bookmark bar (hence "bookmarklet").

Bookmarklets are great to letting you do things quickly, in this case logging a bug. If you are in the middle of something you might not want to stop, open a new tab, remember the url for the issue tracker (come on...most of us google it no matter what, they make it too easy to do), click create, fill in the details...you a sleep yet?

Instead we are going to put a button right on your bookmark bar so when you see an issue you can report it right there and then. Now this is not a shortcut or actual bookmark, it won't navigate away from the page you are in. Instead it will launch a popup and let you fill in your issues right there and then so you can get back to your work asap. Minimum fuss or distraction.

So lets add it, assuming you have created an account on the tracker you need to click the "create issue" button to get to the bookmarklet.

Then on the create issue page itself you should see a yellow box at the top of the right hand column, this is the bookmarklet:

To "install" the bookmarklet (if thats the right word for you) you need to simply click on it and drag it to your bookmark bar (if you can't see it you might have to enable it or make it visible, in Chrome you can do with with Shift-Ctrl-B, spookily this is also the compile shortcut in Visual Studio!).

The default label/name is a bit word so I shorted mine to "uIssue", to do that right click on it and select properties and then rename it. Easy!

Now when you click on it (and you can do this on any webpage although this bookmarklet is hard wired for Umbraco issues) you get a nice popup like so:

Easy as pie. This now streamlines the act or reporting issues so less reason I hope to put off logging issues until that magical "later" that never really comes around.

By not even leaving the page you don't interupt your context or work flow too much but you get to give back some feedback to the team.

If the bug you want to report is a long one then you can at least record a bit of it there and then and maybe come back to flesh it out later.

Recording the initial issue in the first place is the important bit. If the Umbraco HQ (and other contributors) don't know about an issue they can't fix it so reporting even a bit is better than none.

That said the more information you can give the fixer the better. What makes a good bug report? Details on how to recreate it easily, what you saw and what you expected to see.

Include any error messages and stacktrace and if need be a little background context. A screenshot can do wonders too but not always required.

We've been reporting lots of little quirks and possible improvements in the last few weeks most of them via this bookmarklet.

We've been really impressed with the speed that the Umbraco HQ have looked at them, fixed them or commented on them. They are thirsty to make the product as good as it can so do you bit and give them the juice they need to do so. Get logging issues!