Author Topic: redmine: website tool for collaborative project todolist/wiki, bugtracking, etc (Read 34616 times)

Gothi[c] · « **on:** July 19, 2008, 06:19 AM »

mouser and I have been using redmine lately for various projects, and I must say it really helps productivity.
I find this kind of the ultimate `getting-things-done` tool, even if you don't need a bugtracker for what you're doing per se. It's a bit hard to explain everything so I'll just break down the features below:

It has advanced issue tracking (bugtracker), with customizable fields. (ie, you can add your own fields issue reporters can fill out, or customize existion options of issue categories, bug status, etc...)
It integrates with most common source control systems like subversion, cvs, mercurial, etc...
This includes showing colored diff's if you want to compare 2 different versions of a file from an older revision for example.
It can generate gantt charts for all tasks a project. And it will even output these in PDF or PNG format so you can print them or easily share them with people!
It has a calendar feature, showing when issues are due and when they were filed.
It can send out email notifications for issues you 'watch' -or- for all changes
It can generate atom feeds for pretty much any page. So you can have an atom feed of all recent changes, all latest issues assigned to you, all latest unassigned issues, the latest svn commits,... If you can view it, you can get an atom feed from it, pretty much.
It has advanced user and permission management. It has matrix tables of what user group is allowed to change what field in an issue, and which projects are to be private and which are to be public.
It lets you make wiki pages for your project.
It has a built-in editor for notes or other documentation, which you can categorize.
It allows you to upload files for projects, which can also be categorized.
It has version management, which lets you define (multiple) versions for a project(eg: v1.2.0). These can have a due date, and this will be shown in gantt charts and the calendar view. You can assign for which version a specific feature is due.

Related to this is the roadmap feature, which will show a progress bar for each version you defined. Based on how many open/unresolved issues you have for a specific version of a project, and how many closed tickets there are. (if you have 10 open tickets and 10 closed tickets, the progress will thus be 50%)
It allows you to log time for specific issues, or for a project in general. And shows the total time spent on each project, or the total time spent 'this week' on your personal page (my page). This is a great feature allowing you to track how you spent your time. It can also generate detailed 'spent' time reports, which you can even filter by category etc... Great for GTD and tracking how you spend your time on things, and to see if you can improve your efficiency.
It has built-in forum support, you can have a discussion forum for your project at the click of a button, however it's nothing like smf(what we use for donationcoder). it seems a bit limited in what it can do, but could come in handy nonetheless.
It lets you make a 'news' page for your project, where all project members can catch up on the latest stuff they need to know. I don't use this feature a lot since it's mostly just jesse and me, and we talk about most stuff on IRC anyway, but I see how it could be handy if you have a project with more people, or even in an office environment.
It has a link to give you the PDF version of any page you're looking at, this means, very nice reports to print of anything!
Oh and it also allows you to mark certain projects as sub-projets of others.

I'm really a crappy writer/reviewer so please look at the screenshots of all this stuff

:

mouser · « **Reply #1 on:** July 19, 2008, 06:24 AM »

yeah i have to say i'm liking redmine more than i liked mantis. thanks for discovering it gothic

Gothi[c] · « **Reply #2 on:** July 19, 2008, 06:29 AM »

thanks for discovering it gothic

Thank urlwolf, he's the one that made me initially install it on his server

urlwolf · « **Reply #3 on:** July 19, 2008, 07:11 AM »

Yes, redmine is great... And it evolves fast. It's ruby on rails, and that makes test-writing fast (RoR comes with unit testing built-in). I feel testing makes a clear differece: apps with a good test suit add features faster and are easier to maintain. I think one of the things that made bugzilla stagnate and lose the battle against the newer breed of bug trackers is just that testing is not as ingrained in the perl culture as it is in the ruby culture.

mitzevo · « **Reply #4 on:** July 19, 2008, 10:30 AM »

there are many project management apps out there, mainly web based ones... will have to check this one out when i get the time.

Gothi[c] · « **Reply #5 on:** July 19, 2008, 05:27 PM »

there are many project management apps out there, mainly web based ones... will have to check this one out when i get the time.
-mitzevo (July 19, 2008, 10:30 AM)

Yeah, I tried quite a few. So far this is the only one I like enough to stick with.

Shades · « **Reply #6 on:** July 19, 2008, 06:09 PM »

Myself I fell totally in love with JIRA, it does all what RedMine does and then some! It has a web interface (java-based), but the Eclipse IDE has a plugin for it so you can access JIRA directly without leaving the IDE. You can also choose which database it will use (ORACLE, MS-SQL, Postgres, MySQL) and the installation (including database configuration) took me about 30 minutes.

The only bad thing...the annual pricing scheme

Gothi[c] · « **Reply #7 on:** July 19, 2008, 06:17 PM »

The only bad thing...the annual pricing scheme

No kidding

I try to stick to Free software (GPL) for most things I do.

f0dder · « **Reply #8 on:** July 20, 2008, 04:49 PM »

redmine looks pretty nice, thanks for this post!

I was actually just sitting and contemplating giving mantis or trac a go, but for some reason neither of them "does it for me"... but redmine looks very nice, so I think I'll check that out instead

Deozaan · « **Reply #9 on:** July 20, 2008, 08:07 PM »

Has anyone who is experienced with these types of tools checked out dotProject? It's another freeware/open source collaborative project tool.

Gothi[c] · « **Reply #10 on:** July 20, 2008, 11:36 PM »

I looked at the dotproject demo(admin/admin) but the UI seems very cluttered and clunky compared to redmine imo. Thanks for mentioning it though. It would be nice to see more of these systems, since I already found redmine to be very useful.

Perry Mowbray · « **Reply #11 on:** July 21, 2008, 12:36 AM »

Myself I fell totally in love with JIRA
-Shades (July 19, 2008, 06:09 PM)

Me too!

At my last place of work (a university) I installed their wiki: Confuence as well as JIRA. We used JIRA to manage multiple software contractors on our projects.

PPLandry · « **Reply #12 on:** July 21, 2008, 09:40 AM »

Drupal also has issue tracking, forum (threaded or flat) and collaborative docs, plus being a full-blown CMS and tons of add-ons. I'm looking at it right now, to unite the services related to my software: web-site (DNN), wiki style docs (Wikispaces), issue tracking (Mantis).

I'll post some more after testing it further.

Deozaan · « **Reply #13 on:** July 21, 2008, 01:45 PM »

Drupal also has issue tracking, forum (threaded or flat) and collaborative docs, plus being a full-blown CMS and tons of add-ons. I'm looking at it right now, to unite the services related to my software: web-site (DNN), wiki style docs (Wikispaces), issue tracking (Mantis).

I'll post some more after testing it further.
-PPLandry (July 21, 2008, 09:40 AM)

Mouser didn't have nice things to say about Drupal last year...

f0dder · « **Reply #14 on:** July 21, 2008, 04:43 PM »

I got redmine installed on my local in-house server last night, took a bit of fumbling (shouldn't have tried to use sqlite as database backend, recent versions are apparently imcompatible with redmine) - and I wasn't familiar with ruby either. Also, the wiki documentation is slightly out-of-date, and it isn't a 100% step-by-step newbie guide.

But with some linux experience and time for googling, it worked out without too much trouble. Haven't put it through much abuse yet, but I added issue-tracking for fSekrit, found two minor bugs (only in unicode build, which isn't near ready for public prime-time yet) and got redmine configured to auto-close tickets based on commit messages. The whole thing seems pretty slick and well-functioning so far, especially considering it's pre-1.0.

Gothi[c] · « **Reply #15 on:** July 21, 2008, 08:31 PM »

Also, the wiki documentation is slightly out-of-date, and it isn't a 100% step-by-step newbie guide.

But with some linux experience and time for googling, it worked out without too much trouble.

I found that the easyest and most flexible way to deploy it, supporting multiple installs and/or other RoR applications, is using passenger(modrails) with Apache, especially if it has to co-exist with php webapps and lots of other stuff.

f0dder · « **Reply #16 on:** July 21, 2008, 08:47 PM »

Also, the wiki documentation is slightly out-of-date, and it isn't a 100% step-by-step newbie guide.

But with some linux experience and time for googling, it worked out without too much trouble.

I found that the easyest and most flexible way to deploy it, supporting multiple installs and/or other RoR applications, is using passenger(modrails) with Apache, especially if it has to co-exist with php webapps and lots of other stuff.
-Gothi[c] (July 21, 2008, 08:31 PM)

Looks like something to have a look at, thanks. It wasn't too much bother getting redmine running under lighttpd, but it did feel a bit hacky (had to ~~fix~~ hack up one of the ruby files to get svn repo working properly), etc.

But at the "other server", which is where the stuff really needs to run, things aren't so sweet right now. I think I pretty much hate Fedora Core

Shades · « **Reply #17 on:** July 22, 2008, 02:07 PM »

@f0dder:
If you get tired from it (RedMine), today I just found out today that you can request a free license for JIRA [http://www.atlassian.com] when you create/have an open source product.

I didn't take a look at the requirements and don't know of other rules and regulations but maybe it can help you out. JIRA is definitely not a pre-1.0 product by any means.

Gothi[c] · « **Reply #18 on:** July 22, 2008, 05:44 PM »

If you get tired from it (RedMine), today I just found out today that you can request a free license for JIRA [http://www.atlassian.com] when you create/have an open source product.

Looks like you have to be a registred non-profit organization:

JIRA is free for use by official non-profit organisations and charities (proof of non-profit status is required).

JavaJones · « **Reply #19 on:** November 08, 2009, 09:09 PM »

Old thread, but I just thought I'd add my 2 cents in favor of Redmine. I discovered it about a year ago and have been trying to move more and more of my stuff to it ever since. I'm just now getting to setting it up for a lot of my personal projects, and the speed at which I can do so blows away anything else I've tried, including dedicated project management apps. One of the things that's great about it is the inclusion of many ways to interact with it and enter data, from normal "issue" tracking, to wiki, to forums. The wiki element is particularly useful when compared with e.g. a normal project management tool where there are often not good places to enter large amounts of free form project-related data. The addition of file attachments and discreet wiki-format "documents" also gives you more options for organizing info.

All in all I'm a big fan, though I haven't used it too seriously just yet (despite having discovered it a year ago and been tinkering with it since then). I'll report back again soon after I've had a bit more in-depth time with it.

- Oshyan

Gothi[c] · « **Reply #20 on:** November 10, 2009, 02:23 PM »

I still use it now for work+personal use and it helps me preserve my sanity

JavaJones · « **Reply #21 on:** November 10, 2009, 02:58 PM »

After a few days of heavier use I'm still really enjoying this thing. I do wish it had more specific, dedicated "project planning" functionality, e.g. enter in a series of high-level tasks with sub-tasks, due dates, etc. but you can use the issue tracker roughly that way, including scheduling, basic gantt-type charting, etc. Of course there are probably plugins that would help accomplish this, but I haven't delved into them too much yet:
http://www.redmine.o.../redmine/Plugin_List

Just thought I'd also mention, for anyone who doesn't have a web server, doesn't want their data to live on someone else's machine, or just wants a quick and easy way to set this up at home for their own use, Bitnami has a Redmine stack that works very well: http://bitnami.org/stack/redmine
Bitnami basically allows you to install and run Redmine (and many other web-based tools) automatically and easily on your local machine, without worrying about getting all the necessary supporting apps - Apache, Ruby on Rails, etc. Then you just access it locally on your machine through a web browser, easy as pie.

- Oshyan

rgdot · « **Reply #22 on:** November 10, 2009, 03:10 PM »

Bitnami basically allows you to install and run Redmine (and many other web-based tools) automatically and easily on your local machine, without worrying about getting all the necessary supporting apps - Apache, Ruby on Rails, etc. Then you just access it locally on your machine through a web browser, easy as pie.

-JavaJones (November 10, 2009, 02:58 PM)

Wish XAMPP had Ruby 'support'. Torn between downloading Ruby binaries or going the Bitnami route. Redmine looks very nice.

Gothi[c] · « **Reply #23 on:** November 21, 2009, 12:12 AM »

Redmine project management service for dcmembers:
https://www.donation....msg185274#msg185274

mouser · « **Reply #24 on:** November 21, 2009, 12:41 AM »

note that the redmine post gothic links to is only accessible to people who have access to the dc web hosting subsection -- which are those people with a dcmembers.com space.