I started writing about dotProject on the 28th of October. I've set up a small demo project on my localhost to demonstrate how the tool can be used to manage a project.

Any given ticket can have any number of workers assigning time to it. Each of those logs can be assigned a different cost code. That means you can track different charge levels based on the person doing the work on a single ticket.

Project Management tools are often on my mind. I've used many different tools in development of Web systems from Bugzilla (don't use it for project management, great bug tracker, terrible planning tool), to Drupal Case Tracker, to Rally, to Unfuddle, to JIRA, to MS Project, PHProjekt. Some are open sourced and others are proprietary. They all have the same goal though - to allow you to manage and track projects from conception to deployment.

While some tools have been better than others and yet other tools have been more like trying to drive a square peg through a round hole. For example, using Bugzilla to try and manage a project start to finish proved challenging. PHProjekt lacked the feature set that was needed to effectively manage. Drupal Case Tracker was OK, but had its quirks. JIRA is really cool, but the tools that make it especially attractive are licensed.

I've been told that dotproject has a robust feature set and also includes tools that rival MS Project. So, in this blog post I'm going to run through my experiences setting dotproject up locally. Future posts will discuss the pros and cons of the package. I am a Mac user, so I'm focusing this tutorial in that direction, but the directions should work whether you use MAMP, LAMP, XAMP, or WAMP. If you are wondering what the heck these are, check out the Wikipedia Entry