Project Sites

I like project sites. Whenever I start a new project, I always create an online portal that shows the team where they are, where they're going, and what should happen next. Back in the bad old days, I had to laboriously create project sites using ASP and carefully hand-tooled HTML. Nowadays, there are a thousand automatic instant-web-site-majiggery things out there. For Context ice, we used a sharepoint team site with a few minor tweaks. It did the job, but it wasn't anything special.

This one, on the other hand, looks a bit special. The ability to see code checkins on the project site, plus a solid bug tracker and a pretty cool looking wiki engine makes Trac look like it might be well worth investigating for your next project. Looks like they've nicked some of the best ideas from FogBugz, as well as some cool highlighting features for viewing code changes...

In order to get code checkins published onto our ice team site, I had to set up a service that published an RSS feed of checkins from VSS, and then use Smiling Goat's feedreader component to display it on the sharepoint home page. It was a messy solution, and one that wasn't always up to date. Oh, and we also used a flexwiki engine to collect help doco. Trac seems to have it all wrapped up in the one package. Me likee.

Some good document management mightn't go astray though...