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[edit] Project Auriga
An open source time, task, project management, and business integration system created by Freelock Computing.
[edit] Why another project management/time tracking tool?
There are dozens out there--what makes Project Auriga necessary?
While we certainly haven't tried everything out there, we haven't seen anything that quite fits the way we think about the problem. As a small service business, we have some challenges that hardly seem unique:
- Lots of customers, and lots of small individual projects
- Many projects that follow a specific process, with the same tasks repeated over and over
- Some larger projects that span weeks and sometimes months
- A need to instantly see when we have time available to do a project
- A need to easily schedule new work, and not get overbooked
- A need to accurately track hours spent on particular tasks
- The ability to quickly report where our hours were spent
As a dedicated open source business, we also wanted to better integrate some core business systems: our sales management system (SugarCRM) and our billing system (SQL Ledger). We hated having to enter account information multiple times. We're creating a powerful ERP system, capable of managing all aspects of a business, but doing it with a Unix architecture: small pieces loosely joined.
Finally, because we're web programmers and really like using AJAX interfaces, that's what we use to do the job. Drag-and-drop scheduling, rich interfaces, the opportunity to show our clients what we're capable of creating.
[edit] Status
Lots of progress on the core system. We have all major interfaces moved into the current UI toolset on Dojo 1.1, and have developed some new interface guidelines to make these screens more usable. The theme system is now working, too.
We have parts of the system running right now in our business. It's quite rough around the edges, and is going to take some PHP expertise and database understanding to deploy anywhere else. We're working on getting a demo together, along with doing a code sweep before putting in a public Subversion repository.
If you're interested in contributing, please sign up for our developers discussion list at http://foraker.freelock.com/mailman/listinfo/auriga. If you're interested in using Project Auriga in your business, and helping fund its development to get the features you need, contact us at Freelock Computing.
For more details about what works now and what doesn't, see the Status page.
[edit] Download
Code is currently in Subversion, at https://baker.freelock.com/svn/auriga. Check out the README file for details.
[edit] Technology
Project Auriga is primarily written in PHP. We're developing for our environment only--if you'd like to hire us to make it run in yours, we'd be happy to help. If you'd like to contribute code to make it work, that's welcome too.
Here's what we have it working under, and some of the software libraries we've used in its development:
- Linux server, Mandriva and Ubuntu (shouldn't matter which distribution)
- Apache 2
- MySQL 5.0+
- PHP 5.1+ (mod_php)
- PEAR-DB, PEAR-HTML_QuickForm (may drop the QuickForm stuff--easier to do in Smarty)
- Smarty
- Dojo Toolkit 1.0+
-
Scriptaculous and Prototype- being replaced by Dojo Toolkit -
JSCalendar- being replaced by Dojo Toolkit -
Overlib- being replaced by Dojo Toolkit - Mozilla Firefox (some of our pre-scriptaculous Javascript only works in Mozilla browsers-in the future we plan a Firefox extension)
-
Apache mod_auth_mysql- moved authentication directly into PHP code, using Ajax for Basic Auth
See Architecture for more.
[edit] License
We're still deciding exactly how to market this in the future. As dedicated open source users, we plan to keep the core project available under the GPL. We plan to make an API for developing plug-ins, with a base class that may be extended under other licenses. Because we have clients interested in extending this to connect/synchronize with proprietary programs such as Quickbooks, we may want to have a separate commercial license also available.
So whatever we make available from this site and the main Subversion repository will use the GPL, with possibly a dual license structure. That means if you'd like to contribute code, we're going to need to have a licensing arrangement in place so we can maintain our ability to release under other licenses. We're working on this--please contact us if you'd like to contribute!
[edit] User Experience (UX)
The look and feel of Project Auriga is editable using the files in the following directory: SHUKSAN: var/www/auriga Proper credentials will be required in order to access that directory and its contents.
Buttons
Project Details Buttons * Save Changes: saves what's in the Project Details window. * Show Users: shows pane of project "owners", called Users. * Show Tasks: Task Buttons: * Start Time * Switch Task - switches active time to this task. * Details * Time Entry - shows all times associated with that task. * Un-schedule
Areas with an orange background contain data which has been altered but not yet saved. The SAVE button must be clicked in order to save the data.
Possible Improvements
- Use line breaks to get labels in Project Details pane to line up accurately with their respective controls.
- Details button should be more visible (not yellow).
- Header should read "Project Auriga by Freelock Computing".
- Unschedule asks where to re-schedule the hours.
