I am hoping to release my first Android application (yay) and am doing some research on a self hosted (i.e. PHP or RoR) simple support based website where customers will be able to login and report/track issues.
The critical required feature for me is some mechanism where customers will be able to vote on feature requests... where most voted on feature requests will be implemented first.
I use Redmine to project manage all my own and client's development projects. I would use that as it does offer almost everything I need. My main concern with Redmine is that it might be too complex for what I require ( I am also not keen on allowing random users on my Redmine dev server nor on setting up a new dedicated Redmine instance for this new product).
I would like to ask my fellow developers (developers!! developers!!) what their experiences and recommendations are in customer facing support websites.
To recap:
- I am looking for a simple and preferably PHP based web application which I can host on my own box and offers the ability of customers to log in and either report a bug or a feature request. Feature requests can be seen by all and voted on by other customers.
- Another viable option is a Rails Engine based plugin (Communityengine is awesome but way too heavy for this).
- I am aware of issue tracking applications such as Mantis, Bugzilla, Redmine and so on.
Having said all this, am I better off coding my own simple web application? It shouldn't be too hard using Rails and vote_fu to knock something up in a few days. The downside is having to code an additional application and subsequently having to support two code bases.
All comments and feedback very much appreciated.