* First, we do quarterly point releases with a Major release every June. It gives us the ability to pass recent features and fixes to the community quickly without a crazy upgrade cycle. The team is still small but active… we added the latest member last month – Trevor Morse – who has led development on our unit test suite.

* While we don’t have RSS output, we do have iCal for Tasks, so you can get them on your calendar right now. While it’s been in since v1.0 (June ‘09), I just started writing the developer docs now… My team uses it with Thunderbird and Mac’s iCal now.

* The hardcoded todo list and project status issue is still there… we’re working on it. We’ll likely attack that – along with a bunch of other hardcoded things – in the v1.3 (March ‘10) release. One thing we *have* fixed is that the tab order and the id’s are completely independent of one another.

* Next, you can use the date-picker if you want or you can type the date in manually. As long as you use the right format, we don’t care.

* On Gantt charts, we filter the Inactive Projects. I’m working on simplifying some of the Gantt chart display now… we eventually hope to convert to a jQuery-driven version for the UI and only use the static image when someone wants to print them.

* On the widget front, we’ve built out a pretty robust API with a RESTful interface coming next. There are people working on Adobe AIR Task Tracker projects and a few other things right now. We hope more will appear soon.

* In terms of additional reporting or the additional data, it’s still a little rough. Every person, group, and organization asks for a different type of data expressed differently. We’re hoping to standardize and simplify this, but we wanted to get the rest of the system cleaned up first.

* The GUI is ugly. In the dotProject world, *way* too much of the business logic was in the View. In the first release of web2project, we were able to move most of that back to the Controller. In the v1.2 Release (T-15 days, December ‘09), we’ve moved most of it back to the Models. While this makes the API above much easier and better, it’s trimmed down the logic of the Views significantly… to the point where a designer isn’t going to kill the system, probably just wound it.

And more specifically, I’ve been a Drupal user for 5+ years and recently spoke at WordCamp NYC, so in terms of theming, we’re stealing… er… borrowing ideas from people who already had great ones.

So if you’re reconsidering dotProject, I understand. But in the process, you should probably consider web2project too.

Sincerely,
D. Keith Casey, Jr.
web2project Team Member 2007-present
dotProject Team Member 2004-2007
http://CaseySoftware.com