Redmine - Trac without the Suck

Posted by Andrew on July 17, 2008

Looking for a free-as-in-beer issue tracker, forum, and generally flexible project management web application? If so, you could do a lot worse than checking out Redmine. We’ve been using it for a few days at work and I have to say it might be the nicest issue tracking system I’ve ever used.

Here’s the high-level feature list:

  • Multiple projects support
  • Flexible role based access control
  • Flexible issue tracking system
  • Gantt chart and calendar
  • News, documents & files management
  • Feeds & email notifications
  • Per project wiki
  • Per project forums
  • Simple time tracking functionality
  • Custom fields for issues, projects and users
  • SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)
  • Multiple LDAP authentication support
  • User self-registration support
  • Multilanguage support
  • Multiple databases support

Out of the box it works just great, but it’s also extensible and modular and thus easy to customize to your particular requirements. It’s Rails-based too, so diving into the source is pretty easy. We’ve customized how it receives emails and themed it up a little.

Kudos and thanks to the Redmine team for a great piece of software!

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  1. Sarat PediredlaNo Gravatar Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:31:01 CDT

    How did you find the Redmine installation?

    As someone who competes (effectively) with Redmine, I have to say that the Redmine team have done an excellent job of simplifying what could have been a very complex UI into a usable one.

  2. ChrisNo Gravatar Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:59:51 CDT

    Have you used Assembla before? we just got done using it for the last project and are lookin for another, so this is good timing for me.

    Assembla was super buggy(granted it was free) but it would(and still does) associate the wrong users with changesets which is confusing to say the least.

    thanks for the post.

  3. ChrisNo Gravatar Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:03:55 CDT

    DOH, i misread the post, I was thinkin Redmine was a hosted service, the search continues…

  4. AndrewNo Gravatar Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:44:16 CDT

    @Sarat,

    Your product (and site) look nice. I agree that the Redmine UI is pretty nice - simple and clean. One thing I don’t like is the right-click context menu interaction for batch editing. Overriding the browser context menu is IMHO a no-no.

    @Chris,

    It’s super easy to self host. But I’m sure someone will start a hosted version soon.

  5. Sarat PediredlaNo Gravatar Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:41:49 CDT

    @Andrew

    The right-click context menu is definitely a no-no for me. The problem is that everyone expects web-apps to have “Desktop” behaviour these days and JS abuse is rife.

    This is one of the reasons we built a commercial bug tracker. The problem with open source is *design*. I am not saying there isn’t decently designed open source software, but without commercial backing, there is very little effort or will to enable a decent user experience.

  6. Brandon BlackmoorNo Gravatar Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:35:29 CDT

    I am so glad I read this blog before installling Redmine. I have been on the fence whether to set up a new client with Trac or Redmine, and had just about decided on Redmine, but overriding the browser context menu is a deal-breaker. NO web site should EVER override the browser context menu (it should not even be POSSIBLE, imo), and I always recommend to clients that they set Firefox to prevent this.

    So, Trac it is. Thanks for the info.

  7. Alex AustinNo Gravatar Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:11:11 CDT

    Playing with Redmine here, I don’t see any right-click hijacking at all.

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