After much waiting and a few false starts, it exists!

The Project Exporter is now available to all sponsors.

All sponsors should be contacted within the next 24 hours with a private download link. In addition, a demo will be viewable online within approximately 48 hours.

The current release should be considered an Alpha and is open to suggestions, feedback, guidance and - more than anything - a bit of testing. Although we test extensively and have numerous dotProject projects for testing, we don't have every possible one and there may be oddities with your specific projects.

The more - and more complete - information you give, the faster and more efficiently we can diagnose and resolve any issue. Therefore, please provide feedback/bug reports to support [at] caseysoftware.com with the following information:

Since my departure from the dotProject team last November, discussion of dotProject in this space has been minimal. There are a number of reasons for that, but the most important is that because CaseySoftware customers are steadily converting over to web2project. They've been happy with the improved performance and UI enhancements and are excited about the development roadmap. Of course, there are always exceptions...

My biggest single dotProject customer is huge and they're using dotProject for all their core operations. Of course, in the past couple months, they've hit a major problem.... performance.

They have approximately 400+ projects with 25% of those active at any given time. In addition, they have anywhere from 150-600 tasks on any given project. No, I'm not kidding. This gives gives them literally tens of thousands of tasks... which is necessary for their accounting and reporting to various government departments and agencies. It is quite literally the core of their operations.

... show me!

The single most common reason why people sought out support for dotProject is that they didn't get it. Sometimes it was a simple misunderstanding of the terms, sometimes it simply wasn't seeing a key part, and sometimes it's just a difference in how people learn. We all expect people to learn the same ways as us or to figure things out themselves.

Well, that isn't always the case. And in fact, I see it as a sign of maturity and growth when a person/group reaches beyond their own needs and starts appealing to others. Within web2project, we've taken that step:

Towards that goal... web2project now has training videos!

It seems like the last one just wrapped, but the good news is that the next one is right around the corner:

DCPHP Conference 2008

The DCPHP Conference has come a long way the past couple years.  The first year... there were some logistics issues and the attendance was a little low.  I prefer to call it "intimate".  ;)

Last year, it was a world of difference.  The venue was better - (George Washington University in DC, same as this year) - and the organization, polish, attendance, and logistics were at a whole new level.  Unfortunately, I have some good news and some bad news...

It's been a few months in coming, but this is the latest and greatest release of the Project Importer. This one is a minor release but has some nifty new functionality.

Release Notes:

• Fixed an issue with the task_type which was only being set consistently for dynamic tasks. This would cause some tasks not to display in the Project View.
• If you attempt to import a project and there is already one with an identical name, the Importer will automatically delete the existing tasks and import the new tasks into the existing project. A warning will appear to the user during the preview stage.Fixed the parent/child relationship error. In the v1.5 release, a bug was introduced which could cause parent/child relationships to be lost.

And the most interesting part of all is that this is the last planned version for dotProject. All future releases - including the support for additional import options - will support web2project exclusively. Which you can get from SVN right now...

When no one was looking last week, it happened:

web2project became available.

Now to be clear, it's not the full v1.0 release, it's the first release candidate. In case you want to compare this with other projects, here's a quick summary of the differences:

In recent weeks, I've gotten quite a few emails about web2Project and its direction since the fork from dotProject. I've been relatively quiet about it to date as there wasn't much I could show publicly. Now that is beginning to change based on the efforts of the Mighty Pedro... below are a number of screenshots from the current development of web2Project. Click any of them for a larger view.

Most of this post is written with the assumption that you know a bit about dotProject and might have a criticism or two.

First, let's talk just a bit about performance. One of the biggest complaints in the past has been due to the performance of the system specifically the permissions (based on phpgacl). Due to the way phpgacl is structured and was used previously, every operation on an object resulted in a re-querying of the permissions based on the action and object. That makes quite a bit of sense, but if you simplify the logic in a few places and occasionally cache results, you can make some huge performance gains without negatively impacting the security of the system.