dotProject

Please Note: This version has a requirement of PHP 5.2 or greater as it utilizes multi-byte character functionality to help our large amount of international users. We are looking into a more backward compatible solution for earlier versions of PHP. Stay tuned!

To all of you who have patiently waited on us, Thank you! To those who have contributed to this releases success through bug reports, forum posts, and code contributions, a very special thank you!!

We, the dotProject team, are happy to announce the immediate availability of dotProject 2.1.3. This release is primarily a security and bug fix release, but it also marks the first successful release since we've switched to Git.

If you are currently running dotProject, we highly recommend that you upgrade to this release. Please report any issues that you find at our bug tracking site.

The latest dotProject release is available on both GitHub and SourceForge.
.tgz format
.zip format

A complete list of changes is available in the Changelog file (which is also in the downloads).

Happy Thanksgiving and enjoy this new release!

First, thank you to everyone who contributed to our survey over the last few months. The results have been very helpful for us to see how you are using dotProject today.

One of the largest changes we've made as a team so far is to move dotProject 2.x development from Subversion on SourceForge.net (where dotProject 2.x development continues) to Git on GitHub.com. More detailed information on the new setup is available on the dotProject Code Repository page on the docs site.

In the survey results we've found that over 40% of you have customized dotProject in some way. Many of the comments we've seen have also stated interesting customizations and improvements.

Historically, those have been tricky to get back into the core of dotProject. Now, with the move to Git, the process is much simpler.

GitHub provides an easy system for "forking" a project. In Git terminology a "fork" is merely a clone of an existing Git repository. This means that you can create your own fork of dotProject within Git, add your code to the Git repository, pull in changes we make via Git, and request to push your changes to us--which would get them added to a feature branch and eventually the core of dotProject after they're approved.

The particulars of doing this sort of thing is more the realm of the forums.

We hope that this move will allow you the opportunity to contribute your customizations and improvements back to the community in a way that will benefit the entire dotProject community.

Thank you,
TheIdeaMan
for The dotProject Team

dotProject 2.x has been moving very slowly for the past couple years. This is in part to our announcement in December 2007 that dotProject 3.0 would be a complete rewrite. The rewrite continues and you can checkout the progress at the dotProject SVN repo.

However, we realize that 3.0 is still very much "in progress" and that most of you are using some version of dotProject 2.x (or even 1.x). As such, we have begun giving dotProject 2.x renewed focus and energy with the hopes of providing an actively improving project management system for you while you wait on dotProject 3.0.

To that end, we'd like to get some feedback from you on what you're currently using to host dotProject (what version of PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc). We want to consider the typical hosting environment, as we consider implementing the "latest and greatest" technology into dotProject 2.x.

Please take a moment to fill out this brief survey. As always, we welcome any and all feedback at the dotProject support forums.

Thank you,
TheIdeaMan
for The dotProject Team

Please fill out our dotProject Setup Survey.

We're really pleased that Benjamin (aka TheIdeaMan) has offered to help out the project by taking on more of the administrative tasks.

Benjamin has been a much valued and liked member of the dev team for quite a while now and his offer to assist is much appreciated. You can expect to start to see some changes around the place as he settles into the role!

dp3 development proceeded apace whilst we were able to pay one of our developers a wage. Unfortunately that doesn't last forever, and whilst the sponsorship amount was unbelievably generous, eventually a full-time job was required.

Most of the day jobs are currently extremely busy. Perhaps you will have noticed that there's a massive economic squeeze on at the moment - and many people are, understandably, concentrating on ensuring that they do a good job for their employers, to keep the various businesses functioning (and their own jobs alive). dotProject admins "get that" even if a small part of the user community are leaping in for their regular "dotProject is dead" arc up.

In general terms of where we're going as per:

http://docs.dotproject.net/index.php?title=Status_Information

We've always envisaged that we'd have a functionality roll out of

3.x - Resource Managemet
4.0 - Project Budgeting
5.0 - Project Reporting & Risk Management
6.0 - Collaborative Elements & Workflow

We have got some general points sorted out against each of these elements (the current point form list of 3.x elements is on the documentation site) and one day, time allowing, we'll put up some more elements, but really there's no point until we get closer to actually being able to work on them.

//admin rambling on//
dotProject is really a labour of love. An itch we scratch sometimes. We actually got involved years and years ago because it was a product that we needed in house, and it has done a phenomenal job at supporting that function since that date.

Sure there's a lot that could be done to continue growth of the product - and we've got a lot of plans for where we go with it. Having said that, the current dp3 / Zend conversion is going to take a lot of time. Period.

But ultimately, the problem that we've always got is time. And I don't know how many times I have to remind people of this but we don't have a lot of time at the moment, and people having a go at us for what is a reality that we can't do anything about, is about as counter-productive an act as you can possibly do.

We understand fully that people might find the wait problematic and we really hope that they find an alternative product that suits them. But ultimately, dotProject isn't a commercial product, we don't have a commercial imperative - we can't, it simply doesn't provide us with any way that we can eat and work at the same time.

We are also aware that there have been (yet again) a couple of offers to "put a couple of our programmers on the job and give the code to you". We're extremely wary of that approach, and ultimately the question has to be asked - what's in that for us? At best we end up as maintenance programmers for other peoples code, at worst we end up with too many code submissions that skew the project's direction and we run the risk of losing the project focus. (We've tried it in the past and that's exactly what ended up happening). Nobody has yet been able to put a case to us that doesn't end up with either proposition to the fore.

And finally there's the question of our own motivation.

Why do you think we're here?

Why do you think we spend so many of our early mornings and evenings on the support forums, answering questions for people?

Why do you think we do bug fixes, and now spend upwards of 60 hours a release testing?

Why do you think we work on dotProject?

What do you think makes us come back?

//admin rambling off//