activeCollab Blog Archive

Purpose of activeCollab forum is to provide easy way for user to get involved in activeCollab development providing feature requests, bug reports, just chatting about possible applications etc, to get in touch with other users and development team or get support.

There are currently three boards:

• General activeCollab discussions
• Feature requests
• Bug reports / Problems

Also, thanks to creators of punBB for making such a great script.

I'm about to start working on new project files section. Current documents section is pretty limited and not so useful. Here are some notes:

• Files in folders. There will be no folder hierarchy in first version
• Files can be sorted by upload time or by name
• Thumbnails for supported types
• Searchable file types (text documents for instance). In that case script will add their content to search index (indexing can be restricted by type and by file size)
• File versioning. Files can be checked out (locked until user who checked it out does not check it in)
• Users can comment on files
• Default set of folders that are created when project is created. This set can be changed from administration

This one is one of the biggest changes planed for 1.0. It will also introduce attach file to anything and comment on anything features. It should will be fun ;)

After few months of development here it is: alpha1. I've tested installation on Dreamhost (thanks to Peter), TextDrive and Host011. All went fine, without any problems. If installer from some reason fail you please report that so we find the solution.

Maybe it locks too soon to release an alpha, but I'm about to start making some pretty big changes (comments, files and time tracking) and I really wanted to get this out and receive feedback from user. This changes would postpone the launch of alpha for at least two weeks and I just couldn’t wait that much. Plus I promised that I'll launch it before July the 1st.

Most of the features planed for 1.0 are working. Messages, comments, tasks, milestones, permissions, multi-client environment, search etc. Interface is still with minimum of JavaScript. That one will be addressed as soon as I make all model changes and make an API. I've also noticed some problems with handling date and time (script does not save GMT times in database but local times and that’s bad). If you find any other problems please report them.

Have fun and please send me your comments, bug reports, feature requests or anything you have to say.

Short history

First version of activeCollab was written somewhere about May 2005 for personal use. I wanted Basecamp but couldn't afford it. Being a student with a few freelance jobs I just couldn’t guaranty that I’ll have the money for it every month. So I made one for myself... That version is running on my localhost even today.

Version that is now available is big rewrite of that script. Everything is done from scratch – framework, business logic, interface. Experience that I gained developing first version helped a lot. I knew for some existing problems, had most of the business logic in place and really solid guides. It was real fun making activeCollab.

So, the code is here, I think it's well programmed (it will get even better with time), it's working properly. Hope you’ll enjoy it.

Why free?

This thing could be sold pretty easily for some real money. Here are reasons why I released the code under the open source license, free of charge:

1. Putting commercial product on the internet is pretty hard, especially when you are not from United States or United Kingdom.
2. I want to learn as much as I can about web development (client side, server side, development practices…) and open source project is the best way to do that. Many programmer looking at your code is always a good thing. Sometimes you’ll be ashamed of stupid mistake or a bad habit, but that's normal as long as you fix it and learn from it.
3. Clients rarely pay you to spend hours working on small details. Personal project where you are the boss let you show how far you can go. Everything just needs to be perfect and if it’s not than it's time to go and make it better.
4. Meeting other people. My email is ilija.studen@gmail.com so please drop a line or two.
5. Making money. I find it normal to expect something in return for your work. activeCollab will always be free but there will be commercial support as soon as we hit 1.0 for people who need a little more that community support, you can hire me to customize activeCollab to fit your needs or help you integrate it with system you are already running on your server. Or you can just see what I can do and hire me for some project not related with activeCollab.
6. Feeling is much better when you provide free alternative than selling cloned application.

My opinion is that this reasons are good enough. Am I being too honest?