Case Study: Project Management Site Using Drupal's Project* Modules
May 7, 2008 - 4:02pm
Other Modules
If you aren't doing project management over software projects I'd suggest using different modules than the project module and it's associated modules. They were built with a specific purpose in mind and, while you can bend them to a point, there are other modules that are designed to do project management in general.
Check out the case tracker and STORM modules.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
May 8, 2008 - 10:20am
Alternatives to Project*
Yep. Those would be good things to consider today. When I built this site in February of last year, Casetracker's issue queue was pretty messy, and it was unclear if that module even really worked. It appears to be healthier now. It looks like STORM is a newer module, so it wasn't available then.
I think in our case, project* is a pretty good fit. I'd take a closer look at the other two if I was building a Help Desk solution. The features on those modules seem geared towards solving those needs.
Our work flow is actually a lot like the way things get done on drupal.org. We don't need time tracking or any of those features. We just need to keep track of various issues and what's happening with them. Some issues are fixed in minutes, others take months.
Like modules on d.o., most of our custom software projects live on and have to be maintained after they're implement. That's another plus for project* in our environment.
The biggest issues with project* go back to what we've talked about recently. It's a big, messy, monolithic solution that doesn't take advantage of CCK, Views and other conveniences of the current Drupal APIs. The recent change from proprietary follow ups to native comments plus Comment Uploader module was a good step. Derek, Chad and Adam have been working hard to get project* ready for D6, but it looks like there's still a long way to go.
Another weakness of project* is that these modules aren't used much outside of d.o. It seems that wider adoption always seems to help make better, more feature-rich modules in the long run.
Micah
This isn't directly related to a church site, but since the idea for this really started in the comments on Episode 80, I'm going to go ahead and post this here.
I have just posted a ten minute screencast about the project management site we use at Henry Ford Community College.
https://dvc.hfcc.net/about/han...
Most of the walk-through focuses on our use of the Project and Project Issue Tracking modules. I hope someone here finds it useful.
I'd been thinking about creating this screencast for a while. After talking to Shrop about this site (among several other topics) on Friday, I decided to go ahead and do it.
Micah