Update May 2010: I still get numerous requests for info/support, so I'll address them here. As of November 2007, I have no involvement with dotProject. Three of us – Pedro, MacOfTheEast, and I – forked dotProject to form web2project. It's also Open Source and provides an upgrade path directly from dotProject.
Update August 2010: While it pains me to say this, almost none of the updates below have ever made it into a formal release of dotProject. Regardless, their underlying concepts are being implemented in web2project now.
No, we're still alive and kicking. February was one of those months. I'll blog some details once it makes sense.
In terms of dotProject, we've made some huge strides in a multitude of areas:
- Due to extensive discussion with customers and the hard work of cyberhorse, there has been some major advances to the Project Templating. Now, when you import tasks from another project, you have two options. First, you can keep the original assignees instead of having all tasks assigned to you. This is very helpful in areas where there are a series of tasks required for every project that have to be done by a particular person. Next, you can specify a date offset for when the start of the tasks happen. Therefore, when you assign a task to start on Monday, finish on Friday, and take 5 hours – like daily monitoring – it will use dates relative to your offset and keep the duration. Hmmm. True templating.
- When you create Tasks or Task Logs, you can specify durations in regular hours (1.5) or in hour:minutes (1:30). While I didn't initially see a benefit from this, many users think better in these terms.
- In terms of UI, there have also been some minor improvements. More and more of the html is being pulled out of the php and stored in the Smarty Templates. Yes, it's still table-based, but this is the first step on a long road.
- Next, there have been a whole host of annoying UI issues resolved. These include stray decimal points, non-conformance with the rest of the UI, and various other things too numerous and small to really keep track of.
- Finally, we took a hint from SugarCRM and implemented simple row highlighting for in a number of modules. It's a relatively simple tweak but makes things much more readable for general users.
While I've directed these efforts, the vast majority of the work has been performed by the highly esteemed cyberhorse and he deserves the credit for the elegant solutions that have been implemented and some of the things still on the drawing board. And yes, we have quite a few things on the drawing board like simple pagination, robust filtering throughout, per-user and per-project filtering of Calendars, compluete utf-8 handling and a variety of other things.
Keep an eye out for updates.
And just wait until you see what we're doing internally…