Goodbye Basecamp

So I stumbled upon Project Pier, an open source project management tool not that dissimilar from basecamp. (I actually think the project started out as a ripoff of basecamp)

So I downloaded it, installed it on one of my dev machines, and started using it for a couple of days instead of basecamp to see how it would compare. With the exception of no comments on task lists or task items themselves, I must say I'm in love with it. The UI could use some work, but the project does have a full theme system built in (at least I think I saw that out on the site somewhere) There is even some discussion of importing basecamp projects from xml, so I'm super excited about all of this.

Being that its all open source, we won't be restricted to a set number of projects or have to pay the monthly SaaS fee. Its codebase is entirely in PHP, so we'll be able to throw it on our linux hosting that we already have. The only thing that wasn't straight forward and does make less sense (from a users perspective) is that the installation requires its MySQL database server to run InnoDB instead of the MyISAM data storage engine. I can understand if it made the project easier to get started development-wise, but now that its released to the public, you would think that they would use as much standardization as possible. (my dev box's mysql server was easy enough to configure properly, but I'm sure it will be a nice little battle to talk to our web hosting platform into helping us configure our linux machine's mysql servers to run the proper storage engine) I guess in all fairness there is a 'hack' around the innodb stuff so that it will run through the myisam storage engine, but it is just that: a hack....

Well there you have it. I'm sure I'll be posting more about Pier in the near future.

This seems to be the way to go...