BMO/UserGuide
You've probably noticed that BMO has a lot going on. Hopefully you've already watched Understanding Mozilla: Bugzilla, which gives a quick tour of BMO. We'll now delve into some more details of various definitions, features, and processes in BMO.
Many Mozilla teams have had their own getting-started guides to BMO usage. Some of these have fallen out of date, recommending procedures that have been obsoleted by new features. We're hoping this will be a comprehensive guide for Mozilla contributors on any and all teams. If your team has some useful info in your own BMO guide and it's not here, feel free to add it. If we notice that it's no longer a recommended way to use BMO, we'll fix it. Be bold in the wiki way!
Finally, this is a work in progress (and may always be, since BMO is improving all the time). There are many stubs (indicated by italics). If you feel like you know enough to write a paragraph or two about any subject, please do!
BMO vs Bugzilla
Bugzilla is the name of the popular issue-tracking software application, used by many organizations and maintained by the Bugzilla project. Its home is at http://www.bugzilla.org. While the Bugzilla project was started by Mozilla, it is administered separately, having its own Project Lead, Assistant Project Leads, and other roles. Most of the roles are, at current, occupied by Mozilla contributors, but in the past core Bugzilla contributors have not had significant involvement in other Mozilla projects. Mozilla does provide resources, including employee time, to the Bugzilla project. The best description of Mozilla's involvement in Bugzilla is that of a steward.
BMO is an abbreviation of bugzilla.mozilla.org. It is Mozilla's site-specific Bugzilla installation, which is a slight fork of the standard Bugzilla source (or "upstream") with many extensions. At the moment, the fork is technically from Bugzilla 4.2, but many features have been backported from 4.4 and master—in fact, many features in those branches were written by the BMO developers, who added them to upstream but also backported them so they could be immediately available to BMO users. Since we've backported most fixes and features that are of particular use in BMO, we haven't been strict about keeping up with the latest official upstream release. Another difference is that the BMO devs have not prioritized deployability in BMO, since fixes and features are just pushed out each week to the BMO installation, although they have made significant progress in making BMO more hackable.
In sum, the main difference between Bugzilla and BMO is that the former is the name of the general-purpose software, and the latter Mozilla's site-specific installation. An analogue is MediaWiki versus Wikipedia.
Searching
Omg, so many ways to search; why do we have so many, and how do they work?
Quick Search
Quick Search rocks! You should use it.
Advanced Search, Pronouns
Advanced search looks hardcore, but the rewards for learning how to drive it are plentiful. Also, pronouns are amazing.
Other Searches (Instant, Simple, Google)
In case you were looking for more ways to search.
Bugmail
Bugmail is the common term for automated emails from BMO. The biggest source of bugmail is changes to bugs, but BMO may also email you reports and other notices.
Filtering
Too much bugmail? Filter on BMO itself and/or via x-headers!
Filtering with GMail
GMail's ability to filter on headers is somewhat limited. We've got a separate, complete guide on advanced bugmail filtering with GMail.
Users
Bugzilla isn't as user-centric as many modern web apps, but we've added a few features in the last few years.
User Profiles
By selecting My Profile from the dropdown in BMO's header, you can see a collection of statistics about your interactions with BMO. You can use the Search field at the top to see the profile of any other BMO user. Clicking on a user's name in a bug view also provides a link to that user's profile.
There's a project page about User Profiles which has brief description of the fields.
"New to Bugzilla"
A user's comments will be tagged as "New to Bugzilla" under the following conditions:
- The user does not have editbugs access.
- The user has made 25 comments or less OR the account is less than 60 days old.
The "New to Bugzilla" indicator doesn't mean this account was created recently, it's an indicator that this user hasn't used Bugzilla much, please tailor your responses accordingly.
This is only displayed to people with canconfirm or editbugs access.
Understanding, Editing, and Filing Bugs
Standard Bug Fields
Bugzilla bugs have a lot of fields that allow for classifying types of bugs. This also allows for easy grouping and searching for specific bugs. Most of the standard bug fields are described here.
Comment Tagging
Want to convey some out-of-band information on a comment? Tag it. Want to auto-collapse a spammy, abusive, or obsolete comment? Tag it.
Keywords and the Whiteboard
What are all these keywords and weird whiteboard stuff? What is a whiteboard anyhow? Which should i use?
Tracking Flags
tracking-firefox-20? Who's doing the tracking? Should i even set these flags?
Needinfo Flag
It's good and you should use it.
Other Ways to use BMO and its Data
Whining
Bugzilla can automatically send you buglists (requires canconfirm).
APIs
I hear you want to integrate with BMO. Where to start, what to do next, and best practices which won't get you blocked.
Dashboards
Trying to answer the "what should i do today" question? Go no further than the dashboards.