I recently wrote an article on our Company blog about how we needed to find a suitable Issue Tracker for our agency use. The gist is that we desperately needed a web-based way to log and track tasks within our growing agency. A solution that would allow us to categorise and rank the tasks in order of priority - a tough job to do with our old paper and email based process.
Do it the Drupal way
Having disregarded several complicated and off-putting solutions, It wasn't long before our thoughts turned to Drupal and the various issue tracking modules available. We found a very close fit for our needs in the Case Tracker module for Drupal 6. Though CT came with most of our requirements out of the box, we still needed to do some hefty configuration and theme construction to get an end product we could confidently use across departments.
Modules used
We customised the Case Tracker module heavily to change the terminology from Cases to Tasks (a closer definition of how we would use this), added Clients to Projects using taxonomy, provided a bunch of extra views and edited elements to help with theming. Having said that, Case Tracker already supplied email notifications, Project and Case content types and a whole bunch of code that handles status and user assignations.
Other contrib modules we relied on include:
- CCK & Views - obviously!
- Admin Menu - I never leave home without it
- Frontpage & Login destination - to create a login splash screen
- LoginToboggan - to login with email address
- Comment Upload, iTweak Upload & Filefield Paths - for a nicer attachments handling
- Taxonomy Other - to allow adding new Clients on the fly
- CKEditor - IMO this is the best rich text editor
Custom theme
The theme is a custom Zen-based sub-theme loosely inspired by Basecamp's look and feel (another service our account handlers are familiar with). To get the theme started we used the handy shell script found here: http://drupal.org/node/336368. We branded the final product as 'Task Manager' using our corporate red colour. View some screengrabs on our Flickr account.
Download the source code
The good news is that you can now download the Task Manager source code from our website and try out our take on Drupal 6 Case Tracker in one complete and pre-configured package! We are releasing the code in the hope that other agencies can benefit from more organised task management and communication.
Paul Gregory | Web Developer
http://www.accsssadvertising.co.uk
Comments
i think the link at the
i think the link at the bottom is incorrect