I had a research on project management systems. My top 2 choices were .project and Collabtive. Unfortunately I was unable to properly install the .project and logically rejected using it as a personal PM solution.
What I find charming in Collabtive is the concept of usability - most important sections are in the horizontal menu on the top. The system is AJAX-oriented which makes passing through different modules almost transparent. There are few important mods:
- Projects
- Tasklists/Tasks
- Users
- Messages
- Tracking
So, what can you do with Collabtive? Add users with privillegies, write description for your clients and projects, then divide them by phases and add tasklists with tasks. You could set start/end hour for working projects and receive an invoice-like print preview of all projects and how long did you work on them. Fair enough. The only missing feature is automatic tracking and start/stop button for tasks - when you don't have to take care of start and end hour of each task.
Hope this one would be implemented, too. Otherwise you could use Toggl - either the whole PM system, or the timer only. Or use a custom tracking script.
I was surprised that I was unable to login for second time after logout. There was a technical problem with the system. I tried a couple of things to fix the issue, but no success. Some of the known issues include incorrect session.save_path in the PHP settings which can be redefined to a path with writing permissions. The other was the magic quotes option that could misunderstand your user input and therefore change the password itself.
My server had writing permissions and session.save_path changed via php.ini file so problem was hiding somewhere else. The hardcore fix was changing the password from the database:
UPDATE user SET pass = SHA1('your password') WHERE ID = 1;
The Collabtive system uses SHA1 hashing for passes, so I just hashed the pass by myself. So it's working the correct way now.
