Non-'software focused' project management

I'm going to be building this into Spread Firefox v2. If you want to "join forces" let me know. I envision 43things.com meets Basecamp. So it's a bit more ambitious than what exists now...

My patch at http://drupal.org/node/17052#comment-21522, which makes the "status" field options admin configurable, is intended in part to increase the flexibility of project.module to apply to non-software tasks. You may wish to look at this as a small part of what would be needed.

I'm definitely interested in this. I'm looking for a version of the project module that could be used to track bug and feature requests for software that is not in a cvs system. As far as I can tell, project only works if you have cvs as well. It sounds like what you're talking about would be great for this situation.

ditto here, though perhaps this should still be available as a "software model" as well as a generic model. If it werent for the fact we already have a system in place here, I would have used it for that purpose!

I would like to see a generic version which could be used as sort of a "To/Do - Action Item" utility for each user.

+1. this would be an improvement.

i'm using project.module to track issues about the website itself, so members can post bug reports, feature requests, etc. until project supports non-software project more directly, here's what i did on my site to kludge around this problem:

• enabled project.module and created a single project called "website"
• enabled the appropriate roles to create issues, access issues, etc.
• enabled menu.module and made the following changes to the default navigation menu:
  • disabled the "projects" link and all its sublinks (my projects, issues, issues/submit, etc)
  • removed the "project" and "issue" links from "create content"
  • added a new menu item under "create content" called "issue" that points to "node/add/project_issue/website"
  • added a new top-level menu item called "Website issues", (Navigation as the parent) which is a link to "project/issues/website".
  • added new sublinks to this "Website issues" link for all the stuff that used to be under "issues"
    • "submit" -> node/add/project_issue/website
    • "search" -> project/issues/search/website
    • "subscribe" -> project/issues/subscribe/website
  • moved the "my issues" link out from under the old "projects/issues" to be under this new "Website issues" in the menu

this mostly hides the "project", and my users can basically access all the issue tracking functionality directly, without fumbling through the project stuff (which doesn't really work unless there's a software release associated with it). it seems to be working fine for my users. of course, this only works if you don't have any *other*, software-based projects on the same site.

just thought i'd share my kludge "solution" until project itself has a way to handle this more gracefully.

thanks,
-derek

p.s. i recently applied for cvs access, and would also be willing to help the efforts to modify project to work for non-software projects. i definitely need to get a 4.7 test site up and running so i can play with the development versions of everything. seems like it might not be that much work to get project to do what we want, and forking such a large, complex, useful module over this would be a shame. i propose we get into more detail about exactly what we need from project that it doesn't provide now, and figure out what it would take to get it done. i don't have time right now, but if no one else beats me to it, i'll write up an initial draft of my thoughts on it, which can be used as a basis for further discussion...

+1

I too would be really interested in this functionality.

try casetracker.module

sorry, killes. i just tried casetracker, and while i'm sure it's nice if that's all you care about, i have to disagree with you on this.

i'm setting up drupal sites where issue tracking is going to be key. they have both software and non-software projects. having two completely different interefaces, where you can't easily move an issue from one area to another (e.g. moving issues from the "drupal.org maintainance" project into the queue for the underlying module that's actually broken), where there's separate, inconsistent functionality in each system, etc, would be a huge mess. no one wants to enable casetracker to deal with the "drupal.org maintainance" queue, for good reason (not because casetracker is inherently flawed, but simply because it's a different, incompatible system to handle basically the same job).

i'm going to continue to advocate for, work on (and hopefully commit) changes to project to make it not *assume* you're managing software with each project. i still consider this an active, open issue.

and no, i'm not just complaining about other people not doing what i want them to. ;) i have great respect for all the work that's gone into project already (and casetracker, for that matter), but project still needs a lot of work, and i'm doing a lot of that work. i'm just laying out my ideas and motivations publically, and warning everyone that i'm going to continue working on this. ;)

thanks,
-derek

Wow, I just realized this is duplicate with http://drupal.org/node/2110 -- let's move discussion and future efforts into the 4-digit node id! ;)