When web2project was first formed in November 2007, I was recruited to work on the community side of things. I had previously earned a spot on the dotProject team by performing support in the forums, blogging, writing the occasional documentation, collecting user feedback, and tracking bug reports, so it was familiar ground.

At the insistence of John Mertic - Developer Liasion of SugarCRM - whom I met in January at PHPBenelux 2011, I submitted and was accepted to speak at SugarCon 2011 next month. My session - Transparent Collaboration - covers a part of open source that drives most of us up the wall.. integration. Here's the marketing version of the synopsis:

A few weeks ago at the PHPBenelux Conference, I gave my presentation on the rebirth of dotProject as web2project where I covered one way of rebooting a project. But after catching Elizabeth Naramore's talk on "Technical Debt" again, it got me thinking..

Within web2project, we made the deliberate decision to work on our technical debt. Even after 2 major, 5 minor, and one patch level release, we still occasionally find issues ranging from annoyances to things that will require major refactorings*. Either way, since we're steadily documenting them, we're constantly getting a better picture of the state of the system and its strengths and weaknesses.

Alternatively, we could have trashed the code and started from scratch..

The classic example is Netscape 5.

Last week I attended and spoke at the PHPBenelux conference for the first time. What's unique about this conference is that it's entirely run by the local Benelux PHP Users Group. While there was lots of PHP-specific content, it also had a good mix of community and general concept talks too.

I gave one session over the weekend called "Project Triage and Recovery" [slides available here] which was based on the simple premise:

As of Sunday, January 9th, the first version of the Risk Management Module is available for Web2project. While I'd love to be able to describe all the changes, the conversion process covered so many aspects, it's hard to list them all. The most important ones are:

As of 19 December 2010, web2project v2.2 is officially live! You can download it from SourceForge now.

While in many releases we might focus on cleanup or functionality or developer aspects or similar, this one is a mishmash of a bunch of useful updates on numerous fronts. This isn't all of the updates but a bunch of the important ones:

For the Project Managers: