As of 22 September 2010, web2project v2.1 is officially released! You can download it from SourceForge now.

For Project Managers, there are not a huge number of tangible improvements. This was mostly a cleanup release:

• The most important part is that now a User can add Tasklogs for people other than themselves. When you create or edit a Task, you can denote “Allow users to add task logs for others” which allows just that. Users can add hours for anyone currently assigned to work on the Task. The system tracks who logged the time for audit purposes.

For Developers, we had a significant number of cleanups related to timezones, Gantt chart creation, and miscellaneous things here and there:

• The most important part are some cleanups related to the contact_methods refactoring. There were a number of issues that made it into the v2.0 release that are now closed.
• More useful in general was a complete refactoring of the Gantt chart creation. One of our goals for v2.2 is to supplement the current image-based (jpGraph) Gantt charts with both a jQuery and a Flex/Flash-based option.
• We added a significant number of Unit Tests for the system in general but focused on the PEAR/Date and CDate classes specifically. We hope to replace PEAR/Date with core PHP functionality in coming releases.
• We resolved a number of browser compatibility issues for IE 8.
• iCalendar generation has been updated to create VEVENTS that pass validation as per the formal specification.
• We moved a number of duplicate and oddball functions into the deprecation area for refactoring and eventual removal.

For anyone who might be interested, the big time sink during this release was of a legal nature. After the battle between WordPress and the Thesis theme played out and how the GPL could be interpretted, we investigated what it would take to change to a BSD-based license. The good news is that it will be possible – more to follow – and the bad news is the amout of effort involved.

Once again, some great community members stepped up and did a great job in reporting issues, testing fixes, and generally offering insight and sanity checks. Special thanks goes to opto and figgles.

In summary, we closed 38 issues including 3 crash-level issues, 20 minor issues, and 4 features. As always, these are just the formally reported issues and don’t include smaller items that were reported via Twitter, the web2project forums, and other means. If you want to explore everything of interest, check out the web2project v2.1 Release Notes. And of course, if you’re looking for ways to collaborate with us more easily, you should check out our web2project git repository.

You can download web2project v2.1 from SourceForge now.

* And yes, I always wait a few days to announce the releases in case we have to make a patch release.

As of 29 June 2010, web2project v2.0 is officially released! You can download it from SourceForge now.

Although this release had lots of bug fixes, the primary focus was on a few specific new features and major pieces of functionality. You can read the full v2.0 Release Notes, but in my opinion, the six most important items are:

• User-based Timezones: Everywhere a time is used or displayed within the system, it’s now stored in GMT/UTC and presented in the user’s local timezone. If you set a meeting for 5pm America/New_York, someone with America/Chicago timezone will automatically see it at 4pm. If you have team members spread across timezones, this is vital. Lots of thanks to Derick Rethans – the master of all things time-related in PHP – on his numerous presentations on DateTime and Timezones. His information made it possible.
• Unit Tests have come a long way since the v1.0 release. We had zero at that time but Trevor Morse – founder of the Halifax, NS PHP Group and core web2project member – has led the way to 240+ tests focused on the Tasks and Projects classes.
• Subprojects are now Useful: Previously you could denote one project as a subproject as another but it didn’t really do anything, it was just presented a bit differently. With this release, when you assign a project as a subproject, now it creates a token task within the parent project. This token task takes on the start/end dates, duration, hours worked, and percent complete of the subproject. As the subproject updates, the token task updates. Even more usefully, you can use the Token Task as a dependency for other tasks in the parent project. That all sounds complicated, so just try it out.
• The class structure has been completely restructured: While this won’t be relevant to 99% of our users, it makes it much easier to add standalone frameworks – like the Zend Framework or whatever – to the system for other functionality. On a related point, web2project now supports the naming conventions put forth in the Framework Interoperability Group. This will also allow easier third-party authenticators for systems like Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress.
• Audit Logs – We cleaned up the core system objects to provide historical logging of all CRUD operations. Any Add On modules that use the core objects will get this functionality by default.
• Added an ‘update checker’ – This is a regular script which runs to notify the System Administrator that a new release is available and collects basic system information. This was modeled after Drupal’s update functionality. No sensitive information is collected and this can be opted out of via the System Configuration.

A number of community members stepped up and did a great job in reporting issues, helping test fixes and release candidates, and generally being insightful. Special thanks goes to opto, adolfo, zbyszek, and egemme. Without them, v2.0 would not be as solid, useful, and generally as bug-free as it is.

In summary, we closed about 79 items with ranging from 15 crash-level issues to 42 minor bugs. Once again, those are just the formally reported issues. If you want to explore everything of interest, check out the web2project v2.0 Release Notes on our wiki. And of course, if you’re looking for ways to share your code more easily, you should check out our web2project git repository.

You can download web2project v2.0 from SourceForge now.

* And yes, I always wait a few days to announce the releases in case we have to make a patch release.