dotProject – Open Source Project Management for free

Notice the word free in the title. If something is declared as open source this does not imply it should be free. Take a look at FogBugz. It is, one of the best open source project tracking tools currently available. However it’s quite expensive. Maybe not so expensive to larger companies but for small businesses and freelancers it sure is.

Yesterday I came across dotProject tool. If you are like me and came to PHP from .Net world then your first though might be that this is .Net application due to the “dot” in the title. Well, it isn’t, it’s a PHP powered collaboration tool.

To find the download link for dotProject just visit their official website at dotproject.net. Installation on local web server (WAMP) was quite painless. All I needed to do is to create my database before installation. I haven’t had much time to go trough the code, for what I saw (declared variables using var) it seems to be PHP4/5 oriented.

Although the interface itself is quite old looking, I’m surprised at what this app can do for now. Here is the screenshot of the initial screen.

dotProject web application screenshot

If you dislike the interface you can feel free to submit something to the community and make your own theme since dotProject supports themes.

You can declare multiple companies, assign multiple projects to companies, assign tasks, tickets (bug resolving), upload and track files, contacts and so on.

With that in mind and the fact that it’s free I find this app to be great choice for freelance work on more time consuming projects. I’m not gonna say It’s a good solution for serious business, or that this can be worthy replacement for apps like FogBugz, all I say is that you give it a try if you manage to spare some free time.