Presenting Taskope and Rapid Development with Drupal

Fresh Interface launches a beta version of their new web based application, Taskope.
An old problem has a new solution!

Task management even in a small work group can be "interesting" to say the least! The Taskope story starts with our own trials and tribulations with task management. During daylight hours we had a whiteboard setup and used good old sticky notes to track tasks, this was working fine, except when we went home and needed to see what we needed to do next. We tried photographing the board, but this did not help. So being Drupal developers we thought why not just make a simple application that we could all access. And we did! Many long nights later, we had ourselves a prototype. We used the prototype in-house, then mentioned it to a few people who said they love to try it out, so we have now developed a beta version of the Drupal application and given it a name – Taskope.

What is Taskope?

Taskope is an easy to use task management solution. With Taskope you can see which tasks need to be started or delegated, which tasks are being done and which tasks have been completed.

Gone is the "shopping list/to-do list" style of task management and in comes a different way to organise and manage your tasks. And the best part you are in control!

The Taskope interface is designed to take the drudgery out of managing tasks and make your task management fun yet productive. Taskope’s easy to use drag and drop interface, allows you to create sticky notes of tasks, then you can drag and organise these task sticky notes into rows of related tasks.

Why Use Taskope

Why not? If you have tasks to organise, manage and delegate then Taskope offers a new type of freedom in task management. No longer are you restrained to a rigid list and Taskope is particularly handy if you need to share task progress with others. While currently in beta you can share your board with others and allow them to view (not edit) your progress on tasks. Handy if you have a client that constantly checks in (read – phones you a lot!). You simply send them a link to your board and they can view the progress.

Taskope Features

Taskope has been released as a beta and we encourage you to sign on and try out Taskope in its current format, so that we can improve Taskope and add new and helpful features.

Current features

• Drag and drop sticky note interface
• Task board sharing
• Control over how you organise and group tasks

Upcoming features

• Ability to create multiple boards – so you can create a new task-board for each project
• Invite others to share one of your boards and work together on project tasks
• Space to upload files
• Share files with other members of your task group
• Dated tasks
• What other features would you like?

The Who and How of Taskope

Taskope has been developed by Fresh Interface. Fresh Interface are a team of professional and enthusiastic Drupal developers who are keen to test how far you can go with Drupal.

Taskope was rapidly developed completely in house utilizing our front and back end development skills. We have overlapping skill sets that allow us to complement each other, yet not encroach on each other’s turf. We have found that Drupal allows us to be purists in what we each do best.

Modules

Being purists, in order to steamline development and maintenance we used the minimalist approach in relation to the number of modules used. The performance gods also endowed upon us forward thinking, the less modules, the faster things go.

Contributed Modules

• xmlsitemap
• webform
• simplemenu
• memcache
• logintoboggan
• jquery_update
• email_registration

Development modules

• devel
• coder

Custom Modules:

• taskope_user – enhances core Drupal user accounts by providing additional profile fields.  Also manipulates a number of user forms.
• taskope_todo – creates, maintains and polishes a custom todo node type
• taskope_share – boards are great, this module allows a user to share their board with the world
• taskope_board – is our core module that unites todos
• glue – this is the glue that holds it all together, makes update paths easier and updates the database structure.

Drupal Development

Taskope has been developed with Continuous Integration at its core. We have used tools such as Cruise Control to help with regression testing. Mock function for Libraries from work habits and php design patterns has also helped us a lot in unit testing in SimpleTest.

The major difficulties to overcome was that we started using Drupal 5 during the start of development and could not make use of some rich UI capabilities from Drupal 6, such as AHAHA and batch processing. Most of the functions were either back ported or bucked as "future release".

Theming

To give Taskope a great look, we have melded the arts of best practice and rapid development, alright – we cut a few corners in the beta version, but overall the theme is still smooth and functional.

The theme relies heavily on Drupals templating functions in which many variables and templates are overwritten. From taskope_design_menu_links to _phptemplate_variable it is an elegant result that no other CMS could match. Drupal kept our themer and CSS guy very happy and was the only choice for Taskope in its current format.

JavaScript

Things have been made even more delicious with a sprinkling of JavaScript to enhance the flavor of the application and give it its fun and funky functionalities. Relying heavily on jQuery and jQuery UI we crafted much of the interactivity and wow factor that drives Taskope and its drag and drop board. Having worked extensively with other CMS’s and lovely Javascript in the past we found Drupal and jQuery to be a perfect match that allowed us to develop our prototype and beta version with speed.

What do ya think?

We have been working really hard so that we can use Taskope to help us with our task management and planning. We hope you will use it too. Test drive Taskope at taskope.com and let us know what you think. Limited places are available so be quick! Oh… by the way - it’s free!