However, MantisBT is often configured by users to serve as a more generic issue tracking system and project management tool.

In 2002, Kenzaburo was joined by Jeroen Latour, Victor Boctor, and Julian Fitzell to be the administrators, and it became a team project.

[11] With the introduction of plug-in capabilities in MantisBT 1.2.0, revision control integration was redeveloped by Amethyst Reese in the SourceIntegration plugin.

[12] Over time, two additional modules were added and as of November 2013, source integration is supported for the following revision control tools and web-based providers: Upon committing changesets to a source code repository, post-commit hooks within Git or Subversion can be configured to automatically notify MantisBT that changes have been made to the repository.

[12] SourceIntegration allows for issues within MantisBT to be automatically resolved when a changeset message contains special strings such as "Fixes #12345", which are configurable using regular expressions.

[16] The UI also uses the jQuery client-side JavaScript library to provide optional features such as Ajax and JSON powered dynamic page content.

MantisBT's codebase dates back to a time when PHP's support for object-oriented programming principles was in its infancy.

[17] As of version 1.2.0, the majority of the MantisBT codebase still uses procedural programming principles, however some sections have been converted to make use of PHP 5's new object model.

MantisBT bundles a number of dependencies with each release including:[23] For drawing graphs of relationships between issues, GraphViz is required.