A couple a weeks ago, me and a friend decided to start a project, centered around a website. It would be small at first, and it will grow eventually. So we sat down and started talking. We talked alot, both of us had ideas he shared - about how he visions this and that. It was all cool the first day. The second day, we got more ideas. And i got lost. Honestly. So i started looking for some tool to arrange my thoughts, ideas and todos.
In the past, i have worked on previous projects, and i used different tools to help organize things. Mostly trac, because it integrates with subversion well, which is my favorite SCM. But trac lacks in some fields. Setting it up is not so easy, and to have user management build into it, you have to use additional modules or edit config files ( atleast before v11 ). I’ve also looked into other systems like flyspray and specialized to bug tracking as bugzilla ( which i find ugly 
), mantis, jira and i can’t remember what else right now. You can find a list of almost all of them on wikipedia. After playing around and testing all of them, i felt like a i have to use atleast two, to get everything i wanted and that would only make project planning and tracking a pain in the ass.
Then one day i suddenly stumbled upon ( no, this ain’t no shameless plug ) qw-dev.net . I instantly liked Redmine . I am not some fanatic fan of RoR or Ruby itself, but setting it up was relatively easy. Here’s the feature overview from their site :
- Multiple projects support
- Flexible role based access control.
- Flexible issue tracking system
- Gantt chart and calendar
- News, documents & files management
- Feeds & email notifications.
- Per project wiki
- Per project forums
- Simple time tracking functionality
- Custom fields for issues, projects and users
- SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)
- Multiple LDAP authentication support
- User self-registration support
- Multilanguage support
- Multiple databases support
That was more or less, everything i wanted from project management website application. It integrates fine with Mylyn ( about which and more ill write in part 2 ), you can setup almost everything at one place, you have a personal webpage part of the site, which helps you track everything that is going on with *all* of your projects etc etc.
I should note that running debian testing, gets me using RoR 2.1, and redmine supports only 2.02, so i ran into some issues and internal errors when setting it up for the first time, but searching and reading trough their forums helped me solve the problem in 15 minutes.
I think all of the above might look like an advertising, but infact, redmine is not that popular, and it really is a great tool for use. Free, open-source and in active development, which ( for now ) guarantees that even if you have issues with it, there is a high chance of getting help solving them. And it saves you time and effort to set up a few different other tools - bug tracker, wiki, forum to achieve the same result.
Next time ill be hitting on my choices of tools for developing php applications, db software and whatnot else.
