open source project management app that uses django?

[Margie]

Hi everyone,

I would like to create a django project managment web app to be used
internally in my company. I am a software developer, but have little
experience with web apps other than my recent work going through the
sams django tutorial book.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any open source/free django web app
that I might be able to use to get started on this project. Let me
describe the usage model to give you an idea of what I'm aiming for.

At a very high level, the usage model for this web app is that a
"manager" assigns tasks to "employees" on a weekly basis. Associated
with each task is a set of measurements that must be performed by the
employee as he/she does the task. The measurements vary based on the
task, and somemes the measurement is reported with a comment string,
sometimes a number, or sometimes a check mark in one of 'n' radio
boxes. As the employees complete the tasks, they fill in the
measurements. At the end of the week, the manager can look at each
task and review the resulting measurements, and based on that data,
decide the next weeks' tasks.

Unlike a project mangament tool like MS Project, which helps you
schedule and gannt chart the schedule, this is really a tool to for
enhancing project communication. It is intended to allow the manager
to easily communicate tasks to the employees, get the results back,
and then make decisions about what the next set of tasks sould be.
All without having to spend a lot of time emailing and talking to
people. In the environement where it will be used, the manager is
getting results back from maybe 100 different employees, each of which
have a few tasks to do. The data is not complex, but there is just
too much of it to manage without a tool. Currently folks are using
wiki and excel, but in my opninion this is not really automated
enough.

My thought is that a django web client could provide a very simple and
easy to use interface, and could also be extended to get all sorts of
nice long term trend information. For exmaple, t would be interesting
to know if a project being run at site A executes task 'foo' more
frequently or for longer periods of time than a project being run at
site B. As data is across multiple similar projects, it seems that it
could be mined for lots of interesting info to help improve the
productivity of future projects.

Ok - so hopefully you get the idea. Now for my questions:

* Does anyone know of existing web apps (django or otherwise) like
that already exists?

* Does this sound like something that would be good to do in Django?

* Does anyone know of any free/open source software (django based)
that I could use as a starting point? Not being a web developer, I
know that if I do this from scratch, I will probably not do a great
job. No doubt there are a ton of intracacies to window layout, the
structure of the models, the html templates, and other things I
haven't even thought of. So I'm thinking it would be great to
bootstrap from some existing code, even if it doesn't do quite what I
want. I would be happy to contribute my own work back to the open
source community.

Thanks for any ideas!

Margie

[maeck]

Margie,

If you can think up a decent model, you might be able to setup the
core of the project management application in the Django contrib.admin
module.
Development will go fast as long as you can stay with standard CRUD
pages.
The admin model will also give you the user security hooks necessary
for the manager and employees.

As soon as you nee a need for reporting pages or ways to do things a
little more complex than the admin can give you, you can build custom
pages for those. But I would think you could have 80% of your app
running only by setting up the database models and nice admin pages.

Maeck

[Margie]

Thanks - yes, that is pretty much the approach I am planning to take,
but I just figured I'd see if there was anything interesting out there
that would give me a spiffy look and feel for the reporting pages.
One thing that I find confusing is how to come up with a color
scheme. I know that seems sort of low priority, but I swear the first
thing people notice is if your colors are "ugly" or very basic looking
(ie, black and white).

Anyway, I will proceed with putting the models together as that is
clearly the meat of the project at this poitn. I just learned about
CRUD tonight, and I can see how that is very nice.

Thanks,
Margie

> > Margie- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Hanny Wibisono]

http://www.jutdahelpdesk.com/

[Kenneth Gonsalves]

On Thursday 04 Dec 2008 12:57:14 pm Hanny Wibisono wrote:
> http://www.jutdahelpdesk.com/

I get this error:
[lawgon@localhost ~]$ svn checkout
http://jutda-helpdesk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/jutda-helpdesk-read-only jutda
svn:
URL 'http://jutda-helpdesk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/jutda-helpdesk-read-only'
doesn't exist

--
regards
KG
http://lawgon.livejournal.com

[Horst Gutmann]

Looks like you got hit by some evil linebreaks :-)

svn checkout http://jutda-helpdesk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
jutda-helpdesk-read-only

[Horst Gutmann]

Grrr again linebreaks....
<http://code.google.com/p/jutda-helpdesk/source/checkout>

[Kenneth Gonsalves]

On Thursday 04 Dec 2008 4:22:15 pm Horst Gutmann wrote:
> Grrr again linebreaks....
> <http://code.google.com/p/jutda-helpdesk/source/checkout>

this worked:
svn checkout http://jutda-helpdesk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ jutda

[maeck]

You can use the standard css from the admin for your both the admin
pages as the custom reports.
Just load the admin css and follow the same html.

Works for me.

Maeck

[Margie]

Ok - this is very useful! It is just great to see a "real" app that
does something similar to what I want. The code looks very nice and
seems simple to understand. I have downloaded it and integrated into
my little play django application, but I have one problem. In the
README it says:


6. Inside your MEDIA_ROOT folder, create a new folder called
'helpdesk' and
copy the contents of helpdesk/htdocs/ into it. Alternatively,
create a
symlink:
ln -s /path/to/helpdesk/htdocs /path/to/media/helpdesk

This application assumes all helpdesk media will be accessible at
http://MEDIA_PATH/helpdesk/

I did the ln, but I don't understand how to make the contantes of
media/helpdes accessible at http://MEDIA_PATH/helpdesk/

What do I do to make them "accessible"?

Margie

[Margie]

Ok - forget it - I figured it out! I found the django pages on how to
serve static files and that showed me what I need to know and it looks
great now.

On Dec 4, 12:54 pm, Margie <margierogin...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Ok - this is very useful!  It is just great to see a "real" app that
> does something similar to what I want.  The code looks very nice and
> seems simple to understand.  I have downloaded it and integrated into
> my little play django application, but I have one problem.  In the
> README it says:
>
> 6. Inside your MEDIA_ROOT folder, create a new folder called
> 'helpdesk' and
>    copy the contents of helpdesk/htdocs/ into it. Alternatively,
> create a
>    symlink:
>     ln -s /path/to/helpdesk/htdocs /path/to/media/helpdesk
>
>    This application assumes all helpdesk media will be accessible at
>    http://MEDIA_PATH/helpdesk/
>
> I did the ln, but I don't understand how to make the contantes of

> media/helpdes accessible athttp://MEDIA_PATH/helpdesk/

> > - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -