How to contact a certain plugin author?

[mushu]

I want to try the HTMLemail plugin but it crashes my version 2.18.0 of MantisBT. How can I submit a bug or get a new version? There *is* a thread on it and I left a comment but there is no traffic so my comment was not seen. I'm not sure why the plugin doesn't work since it was supposedly updated for this version of mantisBT.

[cas]

Possibly an email is listed in the plugin main program in the root of thre plugin directory or in the readme.

[atrol]

Concerning this plugin: There was a good reason that I wrote this note https://www.mantisbt.org/bugs/view.php?id=12830#c52501

[mushu]

Well atrol, that's okay, however let's face it: the email notices sent to customers are kind of ugly. There's little formatting, notes and information are not in an understandable order, it is extremely difficult to read for ME, let alone a typical non-technical user, and after all these years it appears is still not on the radar to make email templatable or simply just prettier. In a business, software needs to look professional and I'm having a hard time convincing our I.T. folks to switch to this better (in my opinion) product instead of paying tens of thousand$ per year to a lesser, but commercial (and slightly prettier) product.

I've seen this countless times in freeware/shareware products: they are almost always technically better, take less disk space & memory, do much more, yet most are not as "polished" as commercial products. So I apologize for wanting to try anything to make the output look better. I don't know PHP and as the only webmaster for a very large organization I have little time to learn how to write Mantis plugins, unfortunately. I certainly understand that you also don't have the time to do these things (else they'd be done already I'm sure.)

So I'm left in the situation of trying to find something, anything, that looks like it will help me make Mantis output look nicer. And this plugin apparently allows the email output to be configured via templates, which sounds wonderful. I'm okay with making code changes in the main program if they are simple and centered around one area of code or module. When I do updates I install the new version in a different directory, and after a few weeks of testing I do a file timestamp comparison to see which files I've changed in the previous version. Then I run a diff against the changed files, and make the same changes in the new files. Finally I move over the new version into Production.

So if you have any ideas for making output nicer I'm all ears! :-)

[atrol]

@mushu, I fully understand what you are telling, this would be a nice enhancement for Mantis.

I don't need it myself, none of my Mantis users is complaining about ugly email notifications.
I am not able to invest time in it, as it needs quite a lot of time to implement this in a product quality that works for all.
Implementing a quick and dirty solution based on the existing plugin is not a big deal, but is a waste of time concerning Mantis standard.

instead of paying tens of thousand$ per year

Maybe some part of this saved money could be spend to pay a developer to implement what you need.
In best case, it would end in a pull request to the Mantis core, so it would help you and Mantis in long term.