[consulting] Issue tracking for clients

[Morbus Iff]

> There is case tracker which is more generic than
 > just software development, but I have no used.

I am the (new) de facto maintainer of Case Tracker.

The reason I am working on Case Tracker lately has been because I plan 
to use it internally to replace a Basecamp installation. I have much the 
same requirements: Client A should not see that Client B (or really, any 
other client) exists, much less see their actual issues.

Instead of building this into Case Tracker, my own design incorporates 
CCK, Case Tracker, and Organic Groups. I first start with a "project" 
CCK type of my own creation. I then make this both an Organic Group AND 
a Case Tracker project. With this small beginning, I now have the 
ability to restrict Client A from Client B, simply by making the Group 
(ie. "project") a restricted membership (invite only) that is not listed 
in the Groups directory. Case Tracker cases can then be created in this 
Group (ie. "project") and they'd remain hidden, again, based on Organic 
Group visibility settings.

There are still some small holes - Case Tracker is more than willing to 
show all the issues regardless of Groups (since it has no inner know-how 
of Organic Groups), but that is why I'm working on it: to make it more 
Groups aware, and to satisfy the sort of situations you and I both need.

Since nearly all of my Clients are those Needing Drupal Sites, I felt it 
most important to replace Basecamp with a Drupal-only solution - it felt 
wrong to convince a client that Drupal was the way to go, and then have 
all project development through another piece of software entirely. My 
design, and interest, in Case Tracker is to "eat my own dog food".

> In my experience with Trac I have found it to be very useful, but that
> you have to have multiple installations if you want to have any level

This is exactly the reason I ruled out Trac as well - it has no clear 
support for multiple/protected clients, and doesn't plan on it for a 
while, according to their own roadmap.

> However, it's not easy to integrate that with a timeline, is it?  
> Adding calendar views can help, and the new timeline module looks  

One of the major additions I made to Case Tracker (HEAD) recently was 
its ability to attach itself to other nodes, such as those created by 
CCK. For my needs, I have created three "types" of cases:

  * message: the equivalent of a blog entry, with case metadata.
  * event: an event.module event, with case metadata.
  * issue: your standard issue with case metadata.

This allows certain cases to be treated as an event and charted on a 
calendar. This implementation would be how I'd do "milestones" and other 
similar time-based agendas (such as meeting itineraries and followups).

I also plan to create a casetracker_time.module which would allow one to 
enter hourly durations onto both case nodes and comments, so that you 
can track the time you've worked on a single case. I've looked into the 
various other modules that purport to do this, but either found them 
outside my realm of likability (requiring PHP 5 and MySQL 5 and written 
in a decidedly non-Drupal way) or usability (duration entries were 
treated as an entire node type; requiring you to "start" and "end" a 
timer for it to be logged, etc.).

-- 
Morbus Iff ( i still fail to see what this has to do with morocco )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus