Because I am working on several projects at once now, I thought it might be useful to check out what is available from Open Source offerings. I didn’t care whether it was a desktop application or a web-based application, but the advantages of a web-based application seem to be pretty obvious as I am going on vacation soon (from where I will continue to work) and because I am often working on both my desktop and my laptop (and access to this software from both would be nice).
Well, I found a wonderful solution in the Open Source web-based application dotProject. It is a project/task planner, time tracker, calendar, client list, and a powerful collaborative tool that comes complete with .pdf reports, gantt charts, forums, etc. It is based on Moodle, the Open Source educational CMS, which is quite extensible and powerful, although it really doesn’t look or act anything like it.
Basically, my thoughts on dotProject are that it rocks! However, I ran into three problems upon installation that basically anyone on shared hosting like mine (ipowerweb) will run into because of the lack of ability to tweak the server environment. Although I did find the answers to these issues relatively easily by searching on the forums, I thought it might be helpful to post them all in one place.
Problem 1: Projects module
The projects module must be able to create temporary tables in your database in order for it to work; however this is somewhat of a security risk. For this reason, ipowerweb has turned off this function, and so you get errors if you try to run it.
The fix requires you to change the code of the modules/projects/index.php file; but the file, already fixed up, is also located here. I just replaced the original with this file and it worked great.
Problem 2: Gantt chart
The Gantt chart module calls for fonts that aren’t available on the shared server, and results in a host of errors. To fix it; you need to change the following line in lib/jpgraph/src/jpg-config.inc
DEFINE(“TTF_DIR”,”/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/”);
so it reads
DEFINE(“TTF_DIR”,”/home/user-name/public_html/dotproject/locales/en/fonts/”);.
Then you take the fonts listed below from your local machine Font folder and upload them into the fonts folder directory in the second line. You will have to create this folder; it does not exist in locales/en/.
arialbd.ttf
arialbi.ttf
ariali.ttf
arial.ttf
ariblk.ttf
georgiab.ttf
That fixed it for me, at least.
Problem 3: PDF reports
Requesting a report in a pdf format resulted in a number of font and permissions related errors. This problem was easily fixed by changing the chmod to 777 for the following folders: files/temp (where the pdf is stored) and lib/ezpdf/fonts. I found once this was done that the pdf reports on projects, tasks, etc. to be very useful and well worth the little bit of extra effort to make work.
All in all I am impressed with this application and I am looking forward to using it for a variety of projects, including fixing stuff up around the house and things for the kids! I recommend it.
[...] After playing with several Drupal installations, I have my first real project to work on. I am finding a real-world example makes all the difference when it comes to really learning how Drupal works, although that should come as no surprise. I have been reluctant to track my progress on this site here, simply because it is an extra step and I have only so much time to work on things. I rethought this as I found myself returning to previous posts, like this one, when it was time to do another dotProject installation. I decided it might be valuable to do especially because modules in Drupal seem to multiply like cottontails after a wet spring. [...]