When we are about to try a new web application we ask experts, who are familiar with it, what would they recommend us to use, for example, which database backend, which platform, and many more. That's what this chapter will try to do, it will help you learn what options are available and which one fits your needs better.
In this chapter you will also find a very short description of the Redmine interface. It's described in short because I believe it is easy to learn. You will be able to play with it more in the next chapters where we'll discuss how to install and use Redmine. So why this chapter should be of interest to you? The power of Redmine is in its components; some components influence performance, others influence functionality. I'm quite sure that even experienced users will discover new options in this chapter and may decide to switch to or utilize them.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
If you search for a free project management tool most likely you will end up with Redmine. This is an open source Ruby on Rails web application, which can be considered to be the de facto flagship of project management solutions in the open source world. It supports all you need for effective project management: member roles, permissions management based on roles, Gantt charts, scheduling, calendar, roadmap, versions management, documents management, news delivery, files directory, activity view, and more. With third-party extensions, you may also get invoice management, Scrum backlogs, Kanban board, burndown charts, and more. But it's not only a matter of project management.
No one can tell whether Redmine is more a project management tool or an issue tracker. Ideally, a good issue tracker must have some project management features. In Redmine these two components are combined flawlessly. But what makes it a perfect issue tracking application is the fully-configurable workflow, which lets defining issue status change permissions for each role and tracker (issue type). As an issue tracker, Redmine also supports such essential features as priorities, sub issues, watching, comments, custom fields, listing filters, and more. Anyone who has ever worked in a team understands the importance of project documentation. For this purpose, many teams establish Wiki sites. Redmine ships with its own per-project Wiki system supporting the Textile markup syntax and source code syntax highlighting. The staggering thing is that this Wiki syntax is supported all over the Redmine that is in issue descriptions, comments, news, and so on. The syntax also allows you to have cross links to other issues and projects.
For public projects support, Redmine comes with a simple bulletin board module, which allows you to have as many forums as you need. Each forum can have an arbitrary number of threads. Forums and threads can be also watched.
Having read the above paragraphs one may think that the only missing feature for making Redmine host one's projects is some support for version control systems. But such support is also available. Redmine can be used as a repository source code browser. The repository component also integrates flawlessly into other Redmine components such as issue tracker and Wiki. For example, an issue can have list of revisions related to it, a Wiki page can link to a revision, a commit, a source file, and more. With some additional extensions, Redmine also can be turned into a repository manager or even play like Github. The list of supported version control systems is also impressive. They are Subversion (SVN), Git, CVS, Mercurial, Bazaar, and Darcs.
All the things mentioned above make Redmine a perfect application for project hosting. Many individuals and organizations use it for this purpose. But it's not limited to a single project – it is multiproject and each project can have subprojects to any nesting level. Many companies utilize Redmine's collaborative capabilities for forge or labs sites. However, it is not even limited to software development. Other companies use Redmine for customer support, order fulfillment, task management, document management, and more.
I cannot describe Redmine without mentioning the people who created this fabulous software. As soon as you open Redmine, you see the name of its primary author at the bottom of each page (near the copyright section), Jean-Philippe Lang. A huge contribution to Redmine was also made by Eric Davis who then forked Redmine into ChiliProject.
The previous topic makes Redmine sound like some all-in-one software. To some extent it is. It was the evolution of Redmine that made it look like this. It is extremely popular these days and that's why it constantly gets new features. But what makes it so popular?
Having first seen Redmine I got the impression that it was a very easy-to-use and friendly application. It is not overloaded with design and UI elements and everything seems to be in its place. This makes users get used to Redmine and like it on first sight. The very first time I saw Redmine I also thought that perhaps it was too limited for my needs mainly because it looked too simple. Both impressions were wrong; it's not an easy-to-use software and it's not limited. The easiness of the look and feel however does its job. If you need only basic features you are ready to use Redmine right after you have seen it for the first time. When you need more advanced features you need to spend some time learning them. That's the main thing that makes Redmine so popular I believe.
The right tools are built with the right technologies. What make Redmine so "right" are Ruby and Rails. Ruby is known to be perhaps the most modern metaprogramming truly object-oriented language. This programming language is very flexible and is considered to allow building powerful applications fast and easily. All this can be said about Redmine. This all can be said about Ruby-on-Rails as well. Rails is a web framework similar to Symfony and Zend Framework but unlike the others it is the de facto standard for Ruby. Treat Rails as a construction set for building web services like Redmine. The names are so closely associated that many people believe they are about the same language. Ruby-on-Rails also became the source of inspiration for many frameworks and libraries such as CakePHP and Grails. Redmine is built on these technologies and this is the thing that makes it so good.
Of course, you can wonder what exactly is in Ruby-on-Rails that makes it good? The first thing is that Ruby (and therefore Ruby-on-Rails) supports metaprogramming. It's the technique which allows an application to modify its code (that is itself) at runtime. This means that there is almost nothing in Redmine that cannot be altered programmatically. Usually API of an application is limited to some functionality but there are no limitations in Ruby thanks to metaprogramming. What a good feature for plugin API, isn't it? The second thing is that Ruby-on-Rails establishes plugin API, which is used to develop Rails plugins called engines. So as you see Redmine does not actually need to provide plugin API to be extendable but it does. Redmine plugin API is built on top of the Rails engine API.
Thereby we come to the next thing, which makes Redmine so popular—its plugins. If you are familiar with Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails, you need to learn a little to start developing Redmine plugins. Taking into account that Ruby-on-Rails is very popular nowadays, Redmine has a huge amount of potential developers. Therefore it has a large variety of plugins. With its plugins you can even turn Redmine into a CRM or help desk. Some of the plugins will be reviewed in Chapter 10, Plugins and Themes.
Note
The known issue is (at least partial) Redmine versions incompatibility. Redmine plugin API used to be changed from version to version without good backwards compatibility. It's even more critical as many plugins use metaprogramming for altering non-API (core) functionality. But in fact it's impossible to preserve full backwards compatibility in such cases. The same compatibility issue affects the Rails API that is especially seen in Redmine 2.0, which switches from Rails 2 to Rails 3. Hence, when selecting a plugin you should always check if it is compatible with the Redmine version you are using.
And last but not the least important benefits are that Redmine is cross-platform open source and freely available. Open source code and GPL license makes any modification possible. Nothing limits you in making Redmine better fit your needs.