Up until last week, we had been using Trac to manage our web development and SEO projects. Initially, Trac managed our workflow well enough to keep us from investigating alternatives. However, as our number of projects and number of people grew, I found that Trac simply wasn’t scaling with us. Each project needs to be set up independently of all other projects, including users and permissions, and creating a new project requires command line intervention. Multiple project support for a single Trac instance has a been a long standing issue, and the progress (or lack of progress) on that front has been recorded in the “infamous” Trac Ticket #130 .

A New Contender

Enter Redmine, which I actually came across by accident. I was looking into Lighttpd as an Apache replacement for an upcoming project that might require all the performance we can squeeze out of our servers. Browsing the Lighttpd docs section, I thought “hm, this is a nice wiki/issue reporting system they have going here”. At first I thought maybe it was custom, but some quick digging showed that it was built on Redmine, an open-source, Ruby on Rails-based project management system.

Some areas of Redmine look nearly identical to Trac, which is fine by me (Trac is good at what it does, it just lacks some key features). You’ll find Roadmap, Activity (Timeline), Issues (Tickets), Repository/SCM, and Wiki implementations that will feel very familiar coming from Trac.  However, Redmine picks up on a lot of areas where Trac wavers or fails. First, it has a web-managed, role-based security setup, so you can manage your users globally, but set roles on a per project basis. Perfect. Redmine also features document & file management out of the box, which is a nice touch, as is the support for sub-projects, which I’ve already found to be quite useful. Generally, the system is just very intuitive and the default theme has a very clean, polished look.

Installation

As I mentioned earlier, Redmine is built on the increasingly popular and influential Ruby on Rails framework. Installation was fairly easy, and would probably have been a snap if not for the fact that I didn’t already have Ruby on Rails running on the server I was installing to. You can read my notes from the Install (Apache 2.2 / RoR / FreeBSD / Passenger ) here.

Conclusion

At least for the moment, I’m ecstatic about the switch. Obviously we haven’t been on the system very long, so I’ll be sure to update if we hit any hiccups or roadblocks. I have to be grateful to the Trac project due to the time we spent on Trac, but we needed something that didn’t require as much administrative effort to maintain. Also, Redmine’s Trac migration script made the change a breeze.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.