We are an Ethical SEO company providing Joomla web design, internet marketing (emarketing) and training.

Project Fork - Joomla 10 and 1.5 componet - Project Management

For awhile now we have been meaning to set up a project management tool for one of our clients who has 5 different Joomla sites for their multi-national company. As you can imagine, bugs arise and the project list is endless with numerous updates, security patches, 3rd party marketing, etc.

Additionally, their company has locations and staff internationally as well as 100's of dealers.

Finally, we have installed Project Fork for Joomla 1.5. So far, this tool rocks. It, like most components, deserves a day of testing and study, not because it's hard, but because it offers many functionalities which deserve your attention.

In short, you can create unlimited projects, tasks, user groups, etc. You can force users to join as needed, or make the choice optional. In most hierarchical organizations of management > support staff, this is ideal. Either way, you can assign unlimited tasks to the various members of the project group. The user can then log in and leave comments, set progress percentage, add files, create new tasks, etc.

Some short comings are only being able to assign a task to one person. A nice function would be to allow additional multiple users per task, as it's fairly common for a projects / task to have multiple users.

Another thing we would like to see improved is sub-projects or project "folders". Currently, we can only create a top level project and multiple tasks. In some cases, a project may require another project with its own set of tasks to be complete. However, even with this shortcoming, we still find the toll EXTREMELY useful.

Some additional features we would like to see are email replies. For example. Let's say a task is created and assigned to a specific user. The user will get an email notifying them that a task is waiting. The details are in notification email, which is good. To reply, the user has to log in and navigate down to the task to leave a comment. It would be ideal if the user could just email a reply, and have it automatically inserted into the task as the most recent comment. That function would increase work flow tremendously. But, even so, the system is very good as is.

One bug we did find was that the calender week and day functions do not work. Yes, the display will show the calendar by day or week in addition to month. But, when viewing in day / month views do not show events. Bummer. For the time being we just disabled that option for the front end users.

On the note of disabling sub-control panel functions, the system will show a greyed-out link. We think it would be better to just hide the function all together. No reason to taunt the user who doesn't have permissions. Also, the permissions tool tip notices have a transparent background - at least when viewing in Firefox - we have not tested in others yet. That should be a simple CSS fix though.

In summary, we think this is a GREAT, GREAT tool and look forward to future releases and our own customization as the product is released under the GPL, so we have access to the source code as needed.