dotProject

dotProject has been literally around since the dawn of the millennium. Those were the days before Agile project management methodologies became _really_ popular, and the century-old waterfall model with its Gantt charts was the dominant way to manage all sorts of projects, from big to small. Those were _also_ the days when most planners would use a tool such as Microsoft Project — which was (still is?) costly for small businesses, and was meant to be used in an isolated environment (one desktop user, respectively), not on a _shared_ one. dotProject tried to address all these issues, and add some more. Written in PHP, and being able to use different database backends, it also predates several goodies that we're so used to in the 2020s: no strict MVC separation (you can do some styling which can go beyond pure CSS, but much of the code directly emits HTML, so there is a limit to customisation); no popular framework such as Laravel or Symfony (they hadn't been invented yet); no dependency management using composer (it also hadn't been developed at the time), etc. It is written in primitive but robust code (more than 150k lines by 2008!) which does the job. It is semi-modular in concept: there is a "core", but you can develop your own modules and add them to the existing ones. Unlike earlier versions of MS Project, dotProject is not _only_ a project _planning_ tool, but actually a _management_ tool. Once a project is defined, with all the proper task dependencies in place, users can get assigned to each (or self-assign themselves, if they have permissions to do so) and start logging the time spent on each task they've been assigned to. Task logs go beyond just telling how many minutes or hours were spent on a specific task: it also allows attaching relevant files, adding notes, and automatically notify the next person in line when a certain stage has now been completed, and the project can move on. Properly filed comments on each task can also automatically contribute to the budgeting, as dotProject can keep track of how much time each task/subtask takes, based on a cost-per-hour estimate set by the project manager; dotProject can then establish the total project cost and similar metrics/statistics. Configuring everything is not for the faint of heart. dotProject was designed to be used in a business environment and may require extensive configuration — setting up users, companies, departments, clients, and the relationship between all of these, etc. It is flexible enough to adapt to different cases and corporate styles, but it imposes a certain rigidity and strictness to many of its functions and rules. It is supposed to organise a company's project-oriented business workflow, after all: it might have drawn some inspiration from MS Project in the Gantt-producing side, but it's more akin to a small ERP solution. On the down side, dotProject is based on old concepts and the overall design shows its age. Many relatively simple tasks are hard to accomplish and visually complex, as navigation requires opening page after page. There is a rather extensive user manual (with few updates), but just the notion that users _need_ to read a manual to understand how things are supposed to work shows how complicated it is. While semi-modular and with lots of features (for its class of application), some things are hard to accomplish, like authentication — either you use the built-in database user/password system, or there is no further choice of integration, either with LDAP or Active Directory, much less OAuth2 or any sort of SSO solution. There is no support for 2FA and/or hardware keys. Communication regarding the state of the workflow — e.g., notifying the next user that the dependent tasks have been completed — happens only via email; there is no integration with Slack, Mattermost or any other such business-oriented platform. While robust, the code is little maintained, and even less supported. dotProject used to have a company backing up its development as an open-source solution, while selling training and services (such as offering dotProject as a SaaS solution). Unfortunately, the company has closed its doors forever a really long time ago, and the original developers have been scattered all over the world; it's a new generation of volunteers that tries, to the best of their abilities, to keep the project alive. It's currently hosted on GitHub instead of SourceForge, mainly because of the many extra CI goodies that, at the very least, keep dotProject relatively free of major security issues and reasonably up-to-date with many of its vendor dependencies.

Simple to the extent that it excels when used in small teams for project, task and issues tracking, progress reporting and invoicing etc.

I work on many different projects with overlapping time frames. I've tried many different task management tools but they all lacked something that I really needed. That is, until I found dotProject. The things that I value the most: * Provides optional, granular task management and details * Provides rudimentary version control system for files, such as documents and exported e-mail messages * In a meeting, I can add and manage tasks in dotProject through the web browser on my smartphone. * I can add co-workers to one or more specific projects on my dotProject server so that they can collaborate. * Great forum feature * Task logs/updates * Easy movement of a task from one project to another (I love this!) I do have some wishlist things: * Do a UX analysis on the interface. Some features/links should be more prominent and easy to use. * Make the text areas for comments and descriptions support some basic typographic formatting or rich-text, such as bold, italic, indent, lists, etc.

Very good framework. A+.

this is nice - wow :-)