Category: Dotproject

Our complete set of customized site files for new dotproject customizers

Posted on by

For all the dotProject newbies out there, this is the kind of thing I wish I’d had when I got started – it would have saved me a lot of time. I’m posting all the files for a dotproject site I manage, since it seems it may help people get started in customizing dotProject.

Download Files (5.8 mb zip file)

To find my changes, search across all the files for the phrases “ellen added” or “ellen changed” in various comments.

One note of caution! I am not an expert in php or dotproject so the fact that something has been done doesn’t necessarily mean it is done in the best way, nor even that works. But these files should help to get you going. This is presented “as is” and I will not fix things for you or document things beyond what is in the articles I post here (Browse all my dotProject posts)

Continue reading

dotProject Recipe: speeding up DotProject

Posted on by

I run a dotproject site on a hosted server. Once more than a few people began using the site at once, we found that peformance was dropping enough to warrant looking into optimization possibilities. So far, it seems that there are two main steps to take: turn on caching, and add indexes to several tables in the database.

1. Turn on caching in gacl.class.php

In the file gacl.class.php, change the following settings to TRUE and FALSE as shown:

/** @var boolean Caches queries if true */
var $_caching = TRUE;

/** @var boolean Force cache to expire */
var $_force_cache_expire = FALSE;
Continue reading

dotProject Recipe: Add journal entries from the project view page

Posted on by

NOTE (07-02-08): The modified Journal module has now been updated to work with v. 2.x of dotProject.

J. Christopher Pereira created a journal module which is quite handy: it lets you add notes to projects – any type of note, without creating a task.

The module is very useful, but a coworker requested that we modify it so you could add a journal note without ever leaving the project view page. Instead of a new window opening to enter the journal note, you simply enter the note into a text box that is always visible on the project view page.

You just enter text in the new text field, hit “save”…

Continue reading

dotProject Recipe: changing the tab names and content

Posted on by

tabs.jpg

The Projects page comes with a set of tabs, based on a combination of the project status fields and whether or not a project is active or archived, and includes a Gannt chart tab.

We changed the values used for Project Status to

0|Not Defined 2|Pending Content 3|In Progress 4|In Review 5|Complete

(to do this use: System Admin: System Lookup Values:click edit icon next to ProjectStatus)

Continue reading

dotProject Recipe: add a “Complete this task” checkbox to todo list

Posted on by

completionCheckbox.jpg

To allow one-click completion of a task, we added a checkbox to each row of the task “to-do” lists in dotProject.

Usually I try to borrow functions from other places in the application and adapt them to the new location. In this case the completion function was borrowed from the “progress” drop-down menu, on the add-edit Task screen.

The check box submits the same values as if 100% were selected from the drop-down menu.

Continue reading

Customizing dotProject files

Posted on by

dotProject is the most promising open-source (and free) project management software that I’ve found so far.

There are many small changes that needed to be made to the dotProject interface in order for it to work for my team, though. Chief among them was that all projects be numbered. The “short name” field just wasn’t sufficient to uniquely identify projects. We use project numbers in our workflow, in documents, email, and file systems. The number needs to combine the month and year the project was started with a 4-digit unique number.

Continue reading