Basecamp

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Anonymous's picture

First off, I just joined this group and I'd have to say it's a damn good idea and needed.

I know a lot of people in the community use 37 Signals' Basecamp for their projects and for myself, one thing that has been extremely annoying is the fact that you can never have a central place to go to that aggregates all of your to do list items or milestones from all projects to the same place.

I'm talking even in situations where your client is the one that owns the Basecamp account so then you have to login to theirs.

I've been wanting to build this for a while now. I see it as you can go to a page and simply add accounts that it wants to aggregate information from and then it builds their dashboard in a Drupal site with all of this. Each user can do their own of course if they have the permission.

The Basecamp API is vanilla XML and a fair size so we could do quite a bit with it. We could even go as far as setting up our own jQuery widgets to handle sorting of these aggregated to do lists and it handling updating them so you don't even have to go into these Basecamps but just to your own Drupal site to completely manage them.

Now of course this would be a fair size job and that is why I decided to post it here to possibly spark some interest because like I said, I know it's well used in the community so why not make our processes a little easier for ourselves?

I would be willing to take on a role in dev (jQuery side and more) but I think more dev help would be best of course.

Going to leave this wide open.. any comments? I expect Boris Mann to say something :)

Comments

Hey Steve!

jlambert's picture

Hey dude!

Nice post. I think there are a number of directions to go.

1) Why not just replicate basecamp and turn it into a hosted service with Drupal? It wouldn't be difficult to do, I don't think.
2) Implement basecamp crud for Drupal, so you could make the api right into applications. This would be pretty damn useful. I would love to add a "add to basecamp" checkbox to a Drupal post for our inside org.

If you want to kill a project, implement groupware right? But it's a thought...

Thanks for sharing and welcome amigo. ;-)

J

nice

moshe weitzman's picture

i actually like the original proposal to aggregate basecamp items, and not try to redo basecamp itself in drupal. while we're at it, why not aggregate trac tickets as well.

great idea

OpenChimp's picture

I'm using basecamp for the first time on a project. Still learning the ropes but I definately like it for collaborative work with other independent consultants. I'm very interested in figuring out the best way that all of us can collaborate on projects, and it doesn't really make a lot of sense to reinvent the the wheel, but I definitely dig the idea of being able to get the data out of basecamp and into drupal and the reverse would be great too. I'm not sure replacing basecamp would be a good idea though - it's a popular application so other services take effort to tie into it, like FreshBooks which allows you to import projects, tasks and contacts from Basecamp, and you can choose to use basecamp's time management tools or use FreshBooks (which is my pref.) We might be able to build a basecamp in drupal, but are we going to build FreshBooks too??? I think not.

Anyway, I would be interested to hear more ideas about how this could be accomplished.

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