This is the first of a series of weekly updates that I plan to give on the status of web2project development. Don't worry, these should only come out on Tuesdays which works well since I do most of my review, updates, and development on Sundays. I have a few goals in doing this: First, it should help the community stay up to date. Second, it will let people know the project exists and some interesting details about it. Finally, it will apply a bit of friendly peer pressure to make sure I have something to talk about. These will all be tagged with the category "web2project" and the corresponding feed is available here.
First, there have been 12 commits. While most have not been huge, they've all been focused on further refactoring and bringing various data access actions out of the Views and Controllers and back to the Models. As of yesterday, I can proudly say that the Companies and Department modules are completely scrubbed. They have zero calls to the database outside their corresponding classes. According to my notes, we have 13 more core modules that need cleanup, but none are critical for the v1.0 Release.
Second, we still have two open issues. Both of the open issues relate to the Tasks module. The first is in the UI and an odd situation that can happen on form submission. This is not critical for v1.0 Release. The second is in how task dependencies are calculated and handled. If your project management system does not properly cascade tasks when an earlier task changes, it's not very useful. This is critical for the v1.0 Release.
If you have suggestions, feature requests, or find bugs anywhere in core web2project, please report them. Please remember that a more complete explanation of what you expect to happen versus what actually happens will help get your submission evaluated, prioritized, and resolved. And on that note…
Next, one of our community members – Eureka, somewhere in France – shared some updates. Through his suggestions, a pair of changes (r347 for those of you keeping track) to the dotProject to web2project upgrade were made. This allowed defaults to be added to a couple different fields and made the project-subproject display work better on initial upgrade. While the first fix was small, the second fix will prevent users from being confused. Bravo Eureka.
Finally, there's been quite a bit of research into some of the alternative PM systems. Some of them are better at certain aspects – like Basecamp for simple Todo Lists – but are fundamentally lacking in other aspects – like Basecamp for tracking task estimates versus actuals. Regardless, I believe firmly that we can learn from many of them… we just need to determine what does and does not go into core because not all of our users need every feature and a gigantic installation will scare off users.