CRM, Project Management

I’ve been wanting to put together my own apps for various purposes for a while now, for a few reasons:
1. I don’t want to pay anyone the prices they want to charge (Highrise or Basecamp by 37Signals isn’t awfully priced, but still, free=better)
2. I’m looking for some specific features, and I’ve tried hacking some open source project management apps. As I was fiddling with the code, I began to realize how poorly they were coded.

So I have a few questions to ask, as well as pointing some stuff out, and seeing if anyone would like to get involved with me. I can put resources on my server, etc.

One of my biggest questions is, when is Revolution coming out, and would it be better to wait until Revolution is out (for easier build and integration?)?

All of these questions are applicable to both Evolution and Revolution I suppose.

What are the limitations of MODx and the amount of documents within a site?
My initial plan (only in my head - I have yet to set aside time to draw up maps with data and user permissions etc.) would be to make each contact a container, and having containers within for tasks, notes, files, etc. Then, using Ditto, you could have everything showing up on the contact’s page, and everything showing up in a dashboard. The reason I am asking about limitations is: Few clients can quickly snowball into tens of thousands of documents (each note, task, file, deal, appointment, would be another document! figure a small number of 100 contacts with an avg of 15 docs per = 1500 documents plus the ~5 documents for each file [contact, task, note, schedule, files, deal] is 2000 documents.

For the project management I haven’t yet figured it all out, about assigning to groups and making everything work well for me, but I’m going to be working on it. I’ll try and put together some illustrations to show what I am talking about a bit more.

My main point here is to find out if MODx would be able to handle this once the files are getting into the tens of thousands or even millions.

Also, my eventual goal (translate to a long, long time) is to have a CRM, Project Management and Invoicing app integrated into one site, using permissions etc. to allow different users to gain access. I know I could try using different tables or databases for each group of information, and this might help out with limitations, if there are any.

The illustrations are on my list of things to do...I’ve seen in the forums before that other people are interested in seeing these features added, so who would be willing to work on this with me?

Before starting your own project from zero I would definitely suggest to try all possible open source alternatives. Especially these two show great promise:

• Collabtive (great for simple project management)
• OpenGoo (for bigger projects)

I’ve been using

Collabtive (great for simple project management)

for a while now for my admittedly simple project management needs, clean, simple and relatively intuitive, also seems to be fairly well supported, I’ve updated at least once since I started using it.

You might find this thread interesting for some discussion on project management apps: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,24211.0.html

I have wanted to build one on MODx for a while, but I am too lazy to go through all that it would take.

Quote from: Lammikko at Feb 17, 2009, 02:43 AM

Before starting your own project from zero I would definitely suggest to try all possible open source alternatives. Especially these two show great promise:

• Collabtive (great for simple project management)
• OpenGoo (for bigger projects)

I actually was trying out Collabtive on my local host. I was hacking it for it to do certain things for me, and as I used it I found more and more glitches and misspellings. Finally I decided it wasn’t worth it; I couldn’t take the risk of more errors showing up. If it was for internal use only, I wouldn’t mind so much, but it is for clients. I especially liked the interface.

Open Goo is too much; I have very specific needs in mind.

Believe you me, I would rather use something open source that I don’t have to spend time putting it together. I’ve already wasted a number of weeks looking. By the way, depending on your needs, projectpier.org is a pretty decent one also; it is a fork of activecollab from when it went commercial. And, if you want a ton of features, with a very light interface, try webcollab. It is all CSS though, so you could always hack the interface.

Thanks for the ideas though. -Ari

Collabtive is definitely the way to go if you want open source and don’t need activecollab 2.0’s power, developpement has picked up speed, features are added constantly and UI gets some nice improvement regularly.

OpenGoo is not only too much but it’s not what you need