Finding your way around in Mingle is fairly simple and you shouldn't have many problems. However we've provided a few hints, tips and guidelines to help you get around.
Viewing cards is the main thing you'll be doing and Mingle gives you two ways to view cards: in a list view and in a grid view. Select card properties and tags in the Filter list by... section to display the cards you want to work with.
Viewing cards in a list is similar to viewing a spreadsheet. You can add/remove columns for different card properties and re-order the list by clicking a column heading. Click the All tab to list all cards in your project.
Viewing cards in a grid is like viewing cards on a whiteboard or story board. You can group and color cards by card property and add different swim lanes. This lets you drag and drop cards from one card property to another (e.g. from New to In Progress).
When you've found the cards you want to work with, you can save this view for quick access in the future. Saved views preserve the filters used to display cards, and whether the cards are arranged in a list or grid view. For list views, saved views retain any added columns and whether you sorted a particular column. For grid views, saved views retain the card properties used to group and color the view, and any swim lanes you added or removed.
Mingle comes with several tabs by default: Overview, All, History and Project admin. (If you have integrated your subversion repository, Mingle also displays a Source tab.) Other tabs come from saved views that have been converted to tabs. Click those tabs to jump directly to the saved view.
Each card view has a link called Link to this page. This is identical to the browser address (URL), but gives you a quick way to create links to the current card view. You can use these links to send to people via email or IM, or to place on a website, blog or Mingle wiki page. In Windows, right-click on this link to bring up options for copying or sending this link.
Mingle lets you perform a comprehensive free-text search on any project artifact, including cards, wiki pages and source revisions. Mingle lets you search for card names, wiki page names, tags, subversion commit messages, card descriptions and wiki content. If you have tagged a card or wiki page with a search term, Mingle elevates this term in the search results.
To search in Mingle, type your term in the Search field at the top-right of the page.
The History tab lets you view all changes made to a project. There may be hundreds or thousands of changes happening during any given day, but there's probably only several of those changes that are relevant to you. The History filter section on the History tab lets you sort through changes that have happened on a project as they affect your work. From here you can set up email or feeds that match the filters.
To locate wiki pages, click the Project admin tab > Wiki pages link. You can add any content to wiki pages, including project reporting details (graphs, charts, tables), and link to any other wiki page or card. You may also find links to wiki pages on the Overview tab (which is actually a special type of wiki page) or linked from cards.
One of Mingle's strengths is its ability to create associations between project artifacts, and the main way this happens is through links. From within cards and wiki pages, you can easily link to other cards and wiki pages. You can create quick links to other cards by using card keywords, and this is how you link SVN commit messages to specific cards.
Tags are a quick way to create ad hoc flags and groupings between cards and wiki pages. You can search for tags, or filter cards according to how they are tagged from the main card view or the History tab. Select the Project admin tab > Tags link to manage tags within a project.
If you have Mingle integrated with your subversion repository, you can view details of each revision and see specific changes to source files (diffs). Click the Source tab to browse the source repository.
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