A good friend of mine is a freelance web designer and he's using activeCollab to manage his projects since alpha version. Few days ago he contacted me on ICQ and asked for help he was stuck with upgrade script. I already had his FTP parameters and phpMyAdmin access. It took me less than 15 minutes to make everything up and running.

The worst case would be that he searched on his own for the solution, wasted a lot of time trying to make it work, spend hours waiting on the forum and be involved in something that I call telepathic debugging (developer is trying to help by making questions and guessing what could go wrong, asking user to make a proper changes and report back the results, repeat). That is the worst kind of debugging, but when you are supporting software without real access to the problematic code or platform that's usually the only way to go. Stress for the user and for the developer at the same time.

In most cases I just can't help that way and it just wastes users and mine time so I came up with this simple idea. For a small fee (I could not do this for free) I'll fix any installation or upgrade problems on your server. Only data I need is FTP access.

Benefits of this approach:

1. Installation and upgrade is handled by person who knows system very well. You don't need to worry about anything.
2. You'll get complete backup of old system and I'll make sure that everything runs as expected after upgrade is done.
3. When I have the code in front of myself it usually takes me short amount of time to find out where the problem is and how to solve it. Telepathic debugging takes a lot of time and usually results only in frustration.
4. I get to know many platforms and installations and I could use that experience in providing better installers and upgrade scripts in the future. Some strange bugs (like recent blank page problems) can also be nailed this way.
5. Money will be invested back in the project - hiring experts to help, advertising project, competitions when we get plugin support etc.

Fee I had in mind is $20 per intervention (that is my hourly rate). If your host meets system requirements and I still fail to provide a solution you get your money back.

How does this sound to you? This is just an idea and I'd like to hear what you have to say about it.

Btw, If you fear that I might make installation or upgrade process a bit harder just to get more interventions gigs - don't. I would never do something like that.

Release candidate 1 was a success: 10 - 20 bugs found and fixed including:

• RSS does not work on CGI installations of PHP
• Activity log not updating
• Data assigned to Anyone should be displayed to every user on the project (on My tasks page and in iCalendar feeds)
• Double mailing on new comment
• Search string not cleaned up

And more.

Because the number of fixed things is not that small we'll go with one more Release candidate to test the changes in the wild and make sure that provided changes work and does not introduce new bugs. This is the last Release candidate so don't worry - after this there will be 0.7 for sure.

How to upgrade?

If you are upgrading from 0.6 check out this page.

If you are upgrading from 0.7 RC1: overwrite every file except config/config.php and content of /upload and /public/files folder.

Where to report problems or ask questions?

On activeCollab forum in Support section.

Recently I wrote a short tutorial on how to install activeCollab on your computer using XAMPP Lite. Since then visitors recommended another great package that lets you run Apache, PHP and MySQL on your computer. Name of that package is Uniform Server (visit their SourceForge page if their main page does not work) and its much lighter than XAMPP Lite (only 5.8MB download), has a nice little administration panel and does not install anything on your computer so you can use it on your USB stick.

Sounds great? Well, it is ;)

Here are the short instructions how to run activeCollab using Uniform Server.

• Download Uniform Server. I've used self extracting archive - (currently it is UniServer3_3.exe file, but this can change in the future; use the most recent version).
• Extract it anywhere on your local disk (no need for any specific folder names).
• Enable InnoDB support. Open /diskw/usr/local/mysql/bin/my-small.cnf and comment skip-innodb line by adding # in front of it (like #skip-innodb). While you are there it would be good to increase max_allowed_packet to ensure that you'll be able to upload files larger than 1MB. Just add this line bellow #skip-innodb line:

set-variable = max_allowed_packet=64M

• Start Uniform Server by clicking on Server_Start executable file.
  
• Go to http://localhost/apanel/ and run MySQL (there is an option in sidebar).
• Go to http://localhost/apanel/phpMyAdmin/ and create a new database for activeCollab (I'll assume that you named it activecollab, but you can use any other name if you like).
• Download most recent version of activeCollab.
• Extract content of activeCollab archive into the /diskw/www/. You should end up with /diskw/www/activecollab/.
• Go to http://localhost/activecollab/public/install/ and go through the installation process. Connection parametars:

Hostname: localhost
Username: root
Password: root
Database name: activecollab (database we created previously)
Absolute URL: http://localhost/activecollab

• Installation should create all the tables for you and offer you to create administrator and owner company. Do that. After you've done you'll end up with fully functional installation.

Thanks to developers of Uniform Server for this great package. Great job!

In past three months I've received a lot of emails from people who wanted to get involved with the project and help. Help on project of this size is always welcome, but its really hard to delegate work and keep everything organized and moving the same direction, especially when things are in early state of development. I kept this under the full control because there is nothing worse than a lot of effort dispersed in different directions. That would not bring us anywhere.

To be honest, I got really lost in whole thing because I wanted everything to be perfect from start. That was wrong, so lets move in small steps. There is roadmap document that describes future plans and how we plan to execute them. New contribution page that describes how can people get involved and help. Its not complete, but we’ll work on that. Forum is reorganized so it can be used as place where we can discuss all the details.

Here is the short info on current plans and efforts, just to get the picture of whats going on:

• Preparing 0.7 version. RC1 introduced a lot of issues that need to be addressed before we publish 0.7. I've tried to collect all open issues. If you have something to add submit a new ticket or create a new bug report topic on forum.
• Extraction of framework from activeCollab. Some can see this effort as a complete waste of time (yet another framework) but I do have strong reasons for extraction. I'll write more about it in the near future.
• Interface updates. A lot of work will be invested in the interface for the next release. It does not just include AJAX magic and a lot of JavaScript, but also redesign of interface based on feedback gathered in the past three months.
• We also need to provide a good markup and styling guidelines for plugin developers to keep interface consistent and easy to use. Plugins will be introduce lated, but getting this done early can point out some errors or bad assumptions.
• New features. If you read the roadmap carefully you'll notice that time tracker and bug tracker will be part of the next release. That will involve development of some new system resources but more on that later. We need to get framework in shape first.

When you look at it there’s a lot of things that need to be done and your help would be welcomed. Lets organize ourselves and start checking things off the list.

Just to let you know that from now on you can comment not just on blog posts but on any page on this website.

If you find spelling errors, think that some parts are not explained well enough, have a better explanation, solution or can provide more details on issue discussed on the page feel free to post a comment. Information collected through page comments will be used to improve page quality. Old comments that are included in page content or cover old issues will be removed to make place for new discussions.

This system works pretty well for Django project (respect!) and it looks like a pretty good idea. We'll see how things will work out.