dotProject

Good to see it is being picked up again. Rather than forking away, I prefer to have one product under active development trying to improve functionality, flexability & performance. The latter being key in my experience with the default DP installation (solution is available through community). The modules offer a great deal of flexability and on the functional side some intergrated improvements can be made. (most of them are known and will take time).
Keep on going !

Mysql
PHP
Fedora 9 and replicated on centos 5

Mostly use for private use keeping track of project and task at work and private IT type work.

@Cas Thanks for the kudos. We're glad to be back at dP 2.x and hope to have good things out the door soon. We'll keep everyone posted.

Keep going on guys!
dp is an excellent piece of software, thanks for working on it

We use Ubuntu 9.04 and will officially start using dp tomorrow.

web2project was analysed and we still picked dp.

Hope we made the right choice.

For a 'new' start, the questionaire is not really breathtaking.
Part of the info can be seen at the bottom of our forum posts, and apart from the OS, it is clear that ecverybody will have to move to PHP >5.1 and MYSQL > 5.0 at some time soon as older versions are being deprecated, no longer security fixes available, or no longer hosting solutions available.

More breathtaking would have been a questionaire like what new features, or at least which features already published in forums should be incorporated.

'Nobody' (well, at least I don't) really understands why the performance patch does not get in, and the changes posted by the guy proposing a fork also look good. Sometimes, reading the forums feels as if the developer team is not open to ideas originating elsewhere. (no offenses intended, but it may also be helpful to describe how reading the forums feels from the other side - and I read it every day).

So it feels like there are many isolated improvements already in the community, but nobody brings them together (I remember someone offered a drag and drop enhanced version of dp2 which he had already finished), and other improvements.

I am not in favour of forking - by 'over'forking, we get many projects that are nearly identical and which move forward very slowly, because there are not enough developers left in each fork.

So my proposal: can you make a survey of already available extensions in the community, and then decide which are capable to be put into the main code as feature enhancements? Could be a good start before actually writing new code for a version to be replaced by 3.0.

Other than that, I like dP and want to express my thanks - it is, in my opinion, the most advanced project management OS software I found. So I am sticking to dP in a very clear decision (although a little improvement, sometimes, would just sweeten the experience...).

Klaus

@Klaus,

Thank you very much for your reply. Beyond our current, rather limited setup related survey, I do have others planned. Your thoughts about a feature-by-feature survey or some other way to collect community interest in features, is ideally what we'd like to collect in the coming month. At the moment, I'm looking through ways to best collect that information.

Our objective is to give our active dotProject 2.x users much more to enjoy in the coming months. Your feedback, support, and ideas will all be valuable in making our project flourish again.

As we have more ways to get involved, we'll be posting them here and/or the forums.

Thank you for this reply. It was very helpful

@theideaman
Thanks, I am looking forward to what will come. And in the next days, I will contribute a simple integration between dotproject and vtigercrm. So that there is not only 'critizism' but also active involvement.
Good luck,

Klaus

@Klaus, that would be excellent and welcomed by many, I'm sure.

We have some upcoming announcements that will make giving code back even easier. More soon.

Thanks again.

We are very interested in the future of this product and would be willing to contribute to its development...

Thanks for your efforts!

Dear sirs,

Hopefully DP strikes back. I am not for forks; or rather, I tryed using them, especially web2project. But forking them everytime we face a bug we change projects leads nowhere, as we ended up having several projects, each of them with their own problems and peculiarities we have to have to live with.
Why not convert efforts on making DP a better tool.

I checked out the current dotproject3 repository. When I accessed the login page, no images/css were loaded. I concluded that there could be a path problem. BUT to my dismay, while checking the html code, I found out that you use different roots for accessing external files. Check "link href="/css/dp3.css" ..." vs "img src="/dotproject3/www/img/default/dp_icon.gif" ... ". To my mind the root directories are different. Aren't they? If I am right, it doesn't look very professional.

@BigX, thanks for posting. However, the forums are a much better place for asking questions of this kind: http://forums.dotproject.net/ dotProject 3 is still under heavy development, so that setup is very likely to change. We'd appreciate your feedback and input on the forums. Thanks.

I am really looking forward to this project picking up again. While looking for an open source PM solution for our company, I was thrilled to find this product, only to be disappointed by it's lack of active development. I, and my company, would love to support this project any way we can.

P.S. I tried the web2project fork but for some reaon it's lacking a ticket managment system for issues (a major function of any PM system).

We quite liked DotProject but it became dog slow when we hit a certain number of projects. We stuck with it for about a year, and then we switched to OpenGoo.

RedHat 5 (i686)
MySQL 5.1

Best Regards and thanks for you project it is very important for our work

I have recently come back after a long detour trying other systems. The problem is not features. The problem is that dotproject is overwhelming to new users. Maybe all it needs is a new theme with a lot more white space and an appealing design. As it is, I can't get my non-techie team to use it.

@bronto, I understand completely. :) I'm a degreed graphic designer (who turned programmer somewhere during the Y2K apocalypse). As such, I've long wanted dotProject to excel at visuals as well as functionality.

We're currently working out a new roadmap (which I hope to have up soon). In it will be several items that will provide for easier visual customization and improvement.

Hope that whet everyone's appetite. :)

I agree with bronto: giving dotproject an more user-fiendly interface (to allow "common office-people" to use it) should be a top priority.
Then add better reporting (aramis new reports module is a step in the right direction) ad dp will be the project management killer app.

PS
anyway you guys are doing a very good job.
I can't code with php/mysql, but add me to the testers list if you need this kind of help.

@pmpal, those are both frequently cited pain-points, so we'll keep them near the top of our list.

Also, thank you for the offer to help test. I'll let Karen know she's welcome to enlist your services. :)

Reading German IT magazines you will often find PHProjekt mentioned, there are even web hosters that offer PHProject pre-installed. They are Germans and they use Zend Framework (very fine framework) ... but the results are still disappointing - at least for me.

So PLEASE keep up dotProject as THE web based OS PM software. I don't need some 3.x software, I'd prefer to focus on 2.x. I have been impressed by TRAC lately for using it a as tool for requirements management ... and that's what I miss a bit in DP - requirements management. I think this could be done quite easily in DP.

Keep DP up and running!

as for RM, one can use my metrics module which allows for flexable data items to be connected to any project.
see : http://forums.dotproject.net/showthread.php?t=8853

I am a website developer and I use Dotproject since 2004 on a single computer for one user.

I use DP only to track projects and hours worked on projects. I like the way you can add events associated with projects associated with companies (Clients)

I use events/calendar to track time.

I wrote a simple PHP script to work out how many hours (as entered in the calendar) have been worked on a particular project between choosen dates.

One thing I don't find useful is the tasks system. The tasks system is in percent (%) which is not very practical for my time-tracking or planning - I would prefer 'estimated hours' for planning.

Currently using: Ubuntu 9.04, MySQL, PHP5

Good luck with further project development!

I will try 2.1.2 on Linux, with PHP5 and MySQL5.* - PHProjekt didn't work, so please carry on!

cheers!

Hi, I'm evaluating dotProject.
This software is awesome but there is a feature I need that probably is a blocker for me.

I need a site to track projects and issues for several clients, and of course any client should't see tickets other than his company's. I think this is not possible with the current permissions system. Also there are some select lists where any user can see a list of other users.

Thank you, I'm looking forward to 3.0

I have really liked dotProject compared to other available tools - especially when installing some of the modules - like iGantt. Brilliant!!

My only problem is that the dependencies don't seem to work at all - I can't get sliding tasks to work no matter what I do (some would argue that the need for sliding tasks is an indicator of poor project management - and they're right - which is why I need a tool...!!) :-)

Anyway, I have had to abandon dotProject, only for this reason. It's critical functionality that is not working and it's simply not practical to have to manually update every task when one is late.

I was hoping that we could have seen the evolution of a new "Survey Monkey" in dotProject - only to compare the two by the success of Survey Monkey rather than any functionality that is (obviously not) common between them. It would be particularly useful if dotProject also had the ability to *seamlessly* move projects in a *combination* of on-premise and hosted models. That would allow for both low value and high value projects to be run by organisations on dotProject - and to provide a great source of income for the developers..!

Hey guys,

at first: Thanx a lot for the good PM! I think it's the best OS PM out there - except the GUI (me and my team can live with it - but i really can't send customers to DP).

So - i was surprised when reading that there is a 3.x on the way and wanted to see the dev status. Unfortunately it's missing me the version of Zend Framework the 3.x uses. Could someone please tell me the ZF version?

Thanks in advance

Our hosting environment is as follows, although we are getting it moved to a server that has a 5* PHP with INNODB. Hope this helps. We run about 7 php databases on this system, which is a shared hosted supplier.

General server information:
Operating system Linux
Service Status Click to View
Kernel version 2.6.9-89.0.9.ELsmp
Machine Type i686
Apache version 1.3.41 (Unix)
PERL version 5.8.8
Path to PERL /usr/bin/perl
Path to sendmail /usr/sbin/sendmail
Installed Perl Modules Click to View
PHP version 4.4.9
MySQL version 5.0.67-community
cPanel Version 11.23.6-RELEASE 27698
Theme cPanel X v2.5.0

I'd like to have some enhancement of current stable version.

I appreciate everybody's efforts.

As Zend is in the focus a commercial company, I don't understand why DP will depend on them in the future. You will have to update / upgrade when they do and also the community. DP will depend also on the strategy of the Open source policy of this company. Some parts of the Zend Framework again depend on other / external code. This code will also change in the future separately. So you have to follow all this changes in the future without really improving DP-Functions. Then the community has to discuss each of those steps with Providers, Administrators and so on.

Just tell me why not improving DP as is???

@siggi, Thanks for voicing your concern. Zend is "backed" by a company, but that seems to have given it both stability and speed of improvement rather than cause concern. We believe that will continue in the future.

The dotProject team has two goals at the moment: a couple of us continue to work and improve dotProject 2.x, the rest of the team is working on the re-write based on the Zend Framework.

If you would like to contribute towards dotProject 2.x's improvement, I'd encourage you to read the "Git this!" post on this blog. We'd love to have your help!

Thanks again for the input.

I am a little unsure of the current status of the project with the latest about forking... Does this post still hold true and will 3.0 still be a complete rewrite by the original team or is that not the case any longer?

I am still an avid user of 2.1.2 and would definitely like to see the project continue.

@Nicholas, thank you for asking about the plans. The 3.0 re-write is still underway. dotProject 2.x development has gotten a new lease on life, and we hope to use the Git version control system to improve community involvement and contribution. The "forking" mentioned in the "Git this!" post is simply creating your own custom copy of a project via Git (in our case on GitHub) to then more easily send your improvements and changes back to us, the developers, for their inclusion in the main code base. Sorry if that was unclear earlier.

Months ago I switched over to OpenGoo and I'm quite happy with it. They have a very active development and a real nice good working system.

We have been using the 2.x branch of dp for a couple years now and in general find the feature set to be everything out mid sized consulting firm needs. However as we've increase the number of projects and therefore the amount of task logs performance measured in how long it takes a page like the main task list to load has started to really suffer. Its at the point where we are actively considering alternatives. So my 2 cents would be leave the feature set static at least for the next release and really focus on performance issues.
We are on php 5.0 mysql 5.1

@Karl, thanks for letting us know about your decision to switch to OpenGoo. For what it's worth, dotProject doesn't aim to be a Web Office or groupware. Our object is project management. We do that well. We'll be doing it even better soon.

@Mickey Yalon, we agree that speed on large installations (I'm personally involved with one that has 6k+ projects), gets very slow in spots. We will be working to optimize performance along with some "low hanging fruit" features. Thanks for the input.

Thanks for the awesome software. Use it ... love it. Does everything I need it to do. (Am always more concerned with functionality vs "the pretty".)

There is a fix available for the eprformance issue which helped us and others a lot.
We have already asked to to have that as an interim release since performance is key. Without that fix we would have to stop using it.
In my view this is not taken serious enough which is a pitty.

@Cas, thank you for expressing your concern. Performance is being taken more seriously and will be addressed soon.

Was the performance fix you were referring to the one by Trashie (on the forums)? or another one?

Thank you again for expressing your concern.

To get back to topic:

OS: CentOS
Processor: Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
RAM: 2 GB
Disk space: 2 x 120 GB Sata Drive
Control panel: cPanel
Apache: 2.2.9
PHP: 5.2.6
Mysql: 5.0.85

Big rewrites are, occasionally, beneficial. i note that you are using the Zend framework. Rewrites using frameworks get you into this century, about 2004. Today you should be bypassing frameworks and going straight to a CMS. A good CMS provides all the common code for user management, roles, the database, and gives you endless modules to provide extra features.

Pick the top open source CMS, Drupal. You could write your application as a group of add on modules similar to Ubercart, Storm, and so on. If someone wants to add Google maps to locations of projects or tasks, they simply plug in an existing Google maps module and add maps wherever they want.

You write only half the code because the other half is already written, working, tested, and performance proven. You write less than half the add on features because many of the add on modules already exist.

I like dotProject and introduce it to a few organisations when I run projects there. It is painful having everything in a separate database that duplicates information already in the main Web site. When I leave the project, dotProject fades into oblivion because nobody can be bothered transcribing all the contact information every time they open a ticket.

Then you have to take the accumulated ticket information and transcribe it back to the CMS to create user documentation.

If dotProject 3 was released based on Drupal 7, you would have a growing band of Drupal developers using dotProject and contributing to the future of dotProject.

There are several good CMSs out there. The top three would all get you way ahead of a rewrite using just a framework.

@P, thanks for the input. I doubt we'll start the rewrite over at this point in the game. Our current focus is on the next 2.x release. If you'd like to discuss Drupal integration (or other CMS integration with dotProject), I'd recommend hitting the forums and bouncing ideas around there: http://forums.dotproject.net/

Thanks again.

I have gone through your project management tool. I feel its interesting. its covered most of the project management section. Thanks

@theideaman
I was indeed refering to the fix provided by Trashie.

We have a customer who is using this application on our server. We just upgraded the Apache and PHP services to be in PCI compliance. Now he's getting all kinds of error and warning messages when he uses the application. It is version 2.1 - is there a new version that works better for these current versions of system software?:

- Apache 2.2.12
- PHP 5.3.0
- MySQL 5.1.37

Thanks!

--Steve

@Steve Horne, Thanks for writing. PHP 5.3 compatibility is under way at http://github.com/BigBlueHat/dotproject/tree/php_53_compat It's incomplete, but is heading the right direction. That branch will be the basis of a future release. If you'd like to contribute to the development, please fork dotProject on GitHub, checkout that branch, and send us pull requests when you have changes available that solve the issues you face.

Thanks for posting about this.

Whether you decide to fork or completely rewrite version 3 there should be another concept of internationalization. The one used currently does not take in account the linguistic differences that make some translated words in particular context look funny and sometimes even stupid. For example in Russian the word "my" has different writing when applied to singular and plural. All string constants must have context-dependent indexes.

OK

Keep going - dotproject is STILL the beat opensource project management tool available. Looking forward to seeing the next version...