Tag: Project Pier

Project Pier & Kamp Pro 2 on GitHub

I’m working with and on the Project Pier project management software again.

A colleague who was working as a project manager recently left Tactica, and I saw this as an opportunity to do more project management myself, which is what I’m always looking for opportunities for.

This week was really exciting for my project management efforts, but it also means I have to play a little bit of catch up with the development projects at work, since the project management work I do takes away time from development.

You can check out my GitHub fork of Project Pier to follow my development or get the latest version to use it for your project management needs. If you find a bug or have an idea for how to make the system better, I’d love to hear about it, and if I feel it would make the system better for me, it’s likely I will have a patch for it shortly.

For my needs, the part of project pier needing most attention is the UI. The architecture seems solid, and the project management paradigm is quite close to the one Basecamp implements.

To address the UI issues without forcing my ideas into the core, I’ve enabled the themes to overwrite any output of the system (HTML & Javascript), whereas they were only able to overwrite CSS & images before. You can follow my UI changes on my GitHub repository of the Kamp Pro 2 theme developed by the talented Andrew Dotson.

New Version of the ProjectPier Project Management Web Application

I’ve been using the Basecamp project management web app at work for a while, and although I like certain features, I do not want to use that for my freelance work. I mostly do not want to use it because there is an excellent alternative that is very close to Basecamp in it’s functionality: ProjectPier, which presents a long-awaited opportunity for me to work on the code of an Open Source project.

The excellent PHP project management web application ProjectPier saw a new release, version 0.8.6, on December 31st, 2010. There has been a great number of new features added, and now the system is even more like Basecamp.

I’ve contacted the lead developer, and he is interested in learning more about me, and collaborating. The features I am currently most interested in adding are first the things that it does not have and basecamp does. I expect they will all be done in the theme. I plan to then move on to adding some features that I would like to have in a project management tool that we use at Canada’s Web Shop, which will be additions that will require more extensive work, up to and including additions to the database schema.

Should be fun!

New Project Management Tool for my Freelance Work

Bigger Playground for my Website Building Projects

I’ve recently moved my domain, bernardic.ca, to Network Redux web hosting servers. Chris Lowry originally registered the domain for me, in return for some advice I gave him and out of the goodness of his heart. The network redux account is provided by Mark Johnston for free. Mark is my friend and mentor who I met at a call centre I previously worked at. The new hosting allows for more websites to be hosted, so I installed a project management web app written in PHP, called Project Pier.

Professional Project Management Tool

This app provides me with a way to enter projects I am working on, enter associated tasks, and indicate when the tasks have been completed. I can create accounts for clients, so they can keep up to date with the status of the project, add new tasks, and share files. I hope this will improve the communication, as well as act as a reminder of what is left to be done, and it should work well as a central repository of information and files related to a particular project. It is fairly easy to install and use, and since it is written in PHP, I will probably tweak it to my need, and contribute bug fixes & feature enhancements back to the project.