Jacob Santos

It is doubtful at such a early stage that activeCollab would break any hold that Trac currently has. Trac has been gaining popularity, but it is still missing some major feature points for some people. That and I’m tired of the Database is Locked errors.

Unless you want to pay for something that the Zend Framework project has, then Trac is really your best option for project management. There are web sites that handle project management for you, but I like having the power to choose the application and install it myself.

What it Does Right

It does utilize JavaScript in a welcome fashion giving ActiveCollab a good start for “Web 2.0″ style design. It allows mulitple page menu set ups based by what page you are on. Administration doesn’t list the project links and project links don’t list adminstration links in the top link area. You can still get around easily and smoothly, which helps with top link navigation.

No Registering

The owner has to set up all of the other accounts, which I find pointless on an opensource project. You want other people to help and forcing them to sign in isn’t going to make others happy. Since it is PHP, you could write your own Registering or link the account to another application, such as Mantis or Mediawiki.

ActiveCollab Lacks A Bug Tracker

It is a project manager meant to be used along side of a bug tracker (Trac, or Bugzilla, or Mantis) and wiki (Trac or Mediawiki or Dokuwiki). The Task tracker which handles the bug tracking isn’t all that great. Hell, Mantis would be far better as a PHP bug tracker. Now if only it was legal to rip the code off Mantis for ActiveCollab, aside from the unethical mindset, it would function far better.

I do have it in mind to create one for ActiveCollab, either based in part off of Mantis or off Bugzilla and Trac. Mantis would be the best choice since it has been in development for a long time (not as long as Bugzilla), and would be easier to refactor it for use in ActiveCollab. Designing and creating one from the ground up wouldn’t be the best choice, unless you’re going to incorporate some of the awesome Bugzilla or Trac features, which Mantis doesn’t have.

No Wiki

The only option for adding documents is uploading them. While bug tracking would be great as part of the application, the Wiki wouldn’t. You’ll probably end up with something less than Trac with very limited syntax options. Mediawiki isn’t as strict as Trac in wiki syntax, which I like.

I don’t think the author should recreate a wiki for the project. The best choice would be either using Mediawiki or Dokuwiki classes, databases, or linking to just the plain web site.

The reason why I would create the bug tracker is that it doesn’t involve major regular expression and html filtering support. Mediawiki does a great job at both, and the design could be changed as well as an extension for mediawiki created for linking to ActiveCollab documents, tasks, and projects.

No Subversion Browsing

Yeah, well, PHP doesn’t really allow you direct access to Subversion Repositories, so it makes sense. PHP does allow for accessing Subversion through command environment. The problem there is that Subversion would have to be installed before it could be used. Not all hosts would allow access to the command line because a lot of asses are raped with poor security considerations.

There is an early PECL extension for accessing Subversion, but not everyone is going to install PECL entensions and you can’t count of it being there. PHP implementation would be nice, but it would depend entirely on securing the input to the command. The Repository would also have to be cached to speed up the listing, which would lead to cronjobs.

I Like Trac

I wish Trac the best, but I dislike waiting for each version, including 0.11 which should remove a major dependency that really hurts in trying to install Trac. Installing Trac is easy, but some of the dependencies have to be ‘fixed’ before you can install it. There are also a lot of dependencies for Trac and I would like it more if I could just install Trac like I would Mantis or activeCollab, with no dependency and minimal setup configuration.

It would help if I knew Python, so that I could help in the development, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Both Lack Graphic Timeline Representation

It would be nice to see where in a graphic timeline all of the milestones came together and where repository branches came off. It would also see how long each bug took before completion.

It would be nice to have in either product, but it isn’t very easy to do correctly.

Final Words

For an early prototype version 0.6 is nice, but even activeCollab uses Trac for bug tracking. I suspect that will happen less as the application advances. I don’t think that it is ironic, a project should use as many great applications for project management.

I do plan on joining into the development later. I was planning on taking Mantis, Mediawiki, and creating the Subversion Browser for a project like this. It helps that something like that has already been started, so that it wouldn’t be difficult to jump on top of it. It is a nice project that I wouldn’t mind joining and helping on.

I don’t think it would be wise to create a branch for my own features added to it. I would rather that when I create the features that they are added. Having two different projects that are the same with different features wouldn’t help the community.

Update

It seems activeCollab is a clone of Base Camp, which is cool. ActiveCollab seems pretty close to what BaseCamp has, from the screenshot comparsion.

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Tags: PHP

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 11:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.