A projet-management tool like Trac is something a lot of projects are in need of.
Trac used to be cool when there was no alternative. But:
- it’s ugly
- it’s buggy
- it’s incomplete
- it’s still not localized
- it’s no more in active development.
gForge is featureful, but messy and complicated for the end-user. I tried the Vmware virtual appliante and after fighting with it for 30 minutes, I gave up. Too complicated.
It’s why I spent the whole day looking for other open-source project-management tools. Correct integration with a revision control system (especially Subversion) was a must. I wanted something powerful yet simple to use, both from an administrator and an user point of view.
Collaboa was the first one I tried. The latest stable release is a bit outdated, but a new maintainer started to work on it. It’s why I tried the SVN version. It was easy to install, and some bugs (like @users that was not properly exported to some templates) were easy to fix. Collaboa is useable but to be fair, it still lacks important features (like a Wiki) and it’s development doesn’t seem very active, neither is the mailing-list. I then tried a fork of Collaboa that didn’t seem to bring any user-visiblement improvement.
The next one I tried is Retrospectiva, that is also a fork of Collaboa.
Retrospectiva was easy to install. It keeps the ease of use that Collaboa has, but it adds all missing features. Wiki, blog, ticket system, great user management, source browser, everything’s there. Plus it’s under active development. Retrospectiva looks like an excellent modern replacement for Trac, moreover migration scripts are available to switch from Trac to Retrospectiva
The last one I tried is Redmine. Redmine is perfect. What else to say, except the stylesheet, Redmine kicks ass. This is the project-management tool I’ve ever dreamt of. Well maintained. A breeze to install and to use, yet very powerful. It properly support multiple languages, including french. It has almost every feature of gForge, but with a clean and intuitive interface. Redmine is awesome. While I was in love with Trac years ago, Trac looks like stone age compared to Redmine. Download it, try it , you’ll love it. Redmine is the modern open-source project-management tool.