The Missing Link (and free)

May 13, 2009 - Ronn Abueg

When you are a digital agency, you have alot of choice when selecting software to keep your teams productive. There are a wealth of software choices out there, including Basecamp, Unfuddle, etc. But, we needed a solution that we could host ourselves. ActiveCollab was a perfect match for our teams. However, not everything can be perfect. ActiveCollab was missing a few features which we've been adding through its extensible architecture. Our talented developers vowed to fill that gap. One gap ActiveCollab has is a lack of estimated hours on tickets. This module, which we deployed yesterday, fills that gap.

Here is how to get it going on your system:

To install the estimated_time module, the first step is to copy the two directories in to the activeCollab installation: the module itself and the assets. The package contains the entire directory (below) to describe the destination of the files. No modification to core ActiveCollab code is required, but Javascript is required. ROOT

• activecollab/application/modules/estimated_time
• public/assets/modules/estimated_time

The next step is to enable the module via the admin section, which will create the necessary database table to store the estimated time data. Once enable, the 'Estimated hours' will be available when creating and editing tickets. Upcoming features will include budgeted vs. actual hour reports (per project and per client company and across all projects). Please let us know any suggestions and we'll be happy to improve the code for the entire ActiveCollab community.

UPDATE: An issue with the javascript was found where depending on how the activeCollab URL is configured, the callback may not work. A fix has been made so that any URL format would work:

• ac.com/public/index.php?path_info=projects (default for activeCollab v2)
• ac.com/public/index.php/projects (default for older version)
• ac.com/projects (our setup - FYI, this is the nicest format since it provides the cleanest/short URLs)

UPDATE 2: Some additional functionality has been added as well as a bit of rewriting to cleanup code. The additional functionality:

• utilizing existing permission of timetracking module for access
• remaining hours calculation on each ticket
• a project overview sidebar block to display estimated time related summary, such total estimated/remaining time for entire project