case tracker

I've been evaluating solutions for Project management (for the duration of this post, that includes what i describe as project, issue, ticketing, case tracking, and pretty much anything that falls in that category) solutions with Drupal, over a year actually. I keep being enticed by the features of each individual solution, and new promises that are announced for each module(s) and trying them out and coming to the same conclusion with each of them. And yes, all of them seem to have the same problems that I'm hitting repeatedly.

Well today was the supposed deadline for the Google Summer of code project. I have uploaded what I have done at the moment for the supposed deadline to the CVS. You can visit my site and play around with it some, although there are a few bugs that still need to be worked out on it and a few features I will be adding that I didn't get to by the deadline today.

Much of last week was spent reading the new jQuery book that I have just purchased. I have also been playing with the AJAX calls and trying to get the UI to place nice with jQuery and display the forms properly. I started working on a project dashboard too, which is basically and administrator interface to show all projects and their completion across a site. Also I spent time learning how to use joins in MySQL because some of the stuff I am using is getting into more advanced queries and my knowledge of mysql has been limited to just using basic selects to pull out data.

Last week was spent still working on UI enhancements and trying to tackle the problem how how to get AJAX to gracefully work if javascript isn't enabled. Later in the week I ended up attending barcamp. At barcamp I met the authors of the first jQuery book, they also gave a presentation on jQuery and answered some questions I had about it for me. I also found out that one of the authors is really involved with the Drupal community, Jon Chaffer. He is known as JonBob in the drupal community.

Alright, I have been plugging away at various task. I didn't update last week, but have been making good progress. Much I spent a lot of time with design stuff, learning hooks, API, etc. But have finally started commiting code, after much fuss of learning CVS.

Last week was spent giving much overview of the code, as well as starting to play around with the layout and design of the forms. I spent a lot of time catching up on some of the drupal dojos. Diving into the nodeAPI as well as forms API. and spending much time on api.drupal.org to figure out what the current functions in the current case tracker module are doing. I spent some time learning some of the jQuery syntax as well as AJAX ( I am new to programming w/ AJAX). I also spent time learning CVS for drupal.

Last weekend I spent more time on the design document, I also spent time playing with many various modules to see about integration with the extend case tracker module. I have been working on a mock design and how things will function and integrate. I also started looking at all the existing case tracker module code to see how things are interacting with other modules and what type of functionality exist there. I had a discussion with yoroy and with Dave Notik (sponsor of the case tracker module) about usability and design.

This is copied from my current project site: