I maintain projects with hundreds/thousands of issues, and find it impossible to switch to GitHub, because GitHub's issue tracking does not allow sorting.
As a workaround, I use custom labels to set an issue as Critical/High/Medium/Low (priority), and Bug/Enhancement/Task (type).
But in the issues list, I can't order by anything.
I have contacted GitHub already, but is there a solution meanwhile?
I looked at the issues API but can't find an easy way to sort issues. By the way, I would like to sort by type then priority.
Best Answer
You could define different groups of labels like issue types, issue priorities, issue statuses, version tags, and maybe more. In order to be able to see instantly to which group a label belongs to you could use a naming convention like :.
Using such a naming convention should make managing Github issues much easier and helps others to "understand" issues much faster. Note that you can also assign colors to labels which can add even more to readability (I would use a specific color for each label group). But because you still have to assign/unassign those labels to/from issues manually you might want to keep the overall list of groups/labels small.
According to the scheme suggested above you might define groups and corresponding labels as follows.
'issue type' group
type:bug type:feature type:idea type:invalid type:support type:task 'issue priority' group
prio:low prio:normal prio:high 'issue status' group
(These labels describe an issue's state in a defined workflow.)
status:confirmed status:deferred status:fix-committed status:in-progress status:incomplete status:rejected status:resolved 'issue information' group
info:feedback-needed info:help-needed info:progress-25 info:progress-50 info:progress-75 'version tag' group
ver:1.x ver:1.1