Tools for Managing Drupal Projects
Fri, May 8, 2009 by Arnold
When Appnovation started a few years ago, we did not use any project management tools. We only had a shared folder for managing all the documents associated with each project. Over the past few years, much has changed and we started using a few tools:
1) BaseCamp (www.basecamphq.com)
We use BaseCamp for most our project management. This includes the storage of client contact information, projects tasks, project milestones and project files. We find it to be a really effective tool for storing information. Unfortunately the tool does not have any ticket or bug tracking system.
2) TickSpot (www.tickspot.com)
We use TickSpot for all of our time tracking purposes. The budget feature allows to easily manage the time spent on each project and really figure the projects that we are going over budget on. Before using TickSpot, we were using the time tracking feature on BaseCamp which is not really effective.
3) TRAC
TRAC is an open source solution for ticket tracking. It has a really simple interface for adding tickets and associating it with features and project areas. However, it does not have an interface for adding new users. Adding new users require executing server shell commands.
Future Tools
Even though we currently have a great set of tools, we find that it may be time to move on to a more unified system. It is a pain for us to use 3 tools for every Drupal project. Some tools that we have looked into include:
1) ActiveCollab (www.activecollab.com)
This is a tool that combines TRAC, TickSpot and BaseCamp. The amazing part of this tool is that it is highly expandable with a PHP code base that you can build custom extensions with.
Please feel free to leave a comment on the tools that you use for managing Drupal projects.
Anonymous posted on June 9, 2009 8:21 am
We are using: http://www.opengoo.org/
Anonymous posted on June 9, 2009 8:17 am
development seed from washington are going to come up with a drupal build intranet that could fit your needs and you can still modify whatever you want. it's drupal!
http://www.developmentseed.org/portfolio/intranet
http://twitter.com/developmentseed/status/2020536933
http://twitter.com/developmentseed/status/2030617105
Minghui Yu posted on May 9, 2009 4:29 pm
Great blog.
I am also a Druapl developer in Vancouver. I came across to your company's website through Google. Great blog! Just bookmark it.
Rick Vugteveen posted on May 8, 2009 9:44 pm
Excellent topic. At ImageX, we recently switched to Redmine for issue tracking and code repository hosting. Depending on your needs, it can also be used for Basecamp style project management and time tracking. It is an open source Rails app. I like it much better than Trac as it has true multi-project support. Highly recommend.
Other web apps we use:
* Basecamp for project management and communications.
* Highrise for CRM.
* Google Apps for email, calendaring, spreadhsheets & docs.
* Harvest for time tracking (Basecamp time tracking doesn't cut it).
* Beanstalk for SVN repositories (in the process of transitioning to Redmine).
* Drupal for our internal employee handbook. We also have a Drupal site running custom reporting app that takes advantage of Harvest's API. This will be released as a module and blogged about once abstracted and cleaned up. We'll blog about it when ready.
* OnSIP for cloud based PBX and VoIP phones.
In general, these tools all work wonderfully for our distributed team. The largest challenge is pulling it all together in a coherent fashion. OpenID support in most apps helps for logins, but there is still a lot of unnecessary duplication.
Julia posted on May 8, 2009 9:24 pm
For time tracking we use paymo.biz,
and BaseCump too..
Thank you for your post, i try to find a better solution for PM.
And i found out that Tickspot has integration with Basecamp, it sounds interesting..
Tonny posted on May 8, 2009 8:50 pm
Me and my team using services of 5PMWeb for managing our projects. They are very simple with great and intuitive interface for work. Recommend.
Mark posted on May 8, 2009 11:17 am
Redmine! Best issue tracker by miles. Then MediaWiki for project info.
http://www.redmine.org/
venkat-rk@drupal.org posted on May 8, 2009 7:47 am
I found a mention of Unfuddle in one of the recent case studies on drupal.org. It seems to have pretty much everything you want.
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