Redmine

Hi Matthew,

welcome back. Redmine as a self hosted software for project management had a hard time competing to all those shiny SaaS platforms which became popular in the last decade. I think it has lost its momentum in this time. Most of the dwarfs form the early days have left the project and JPL has not much time for it either. There's not much we can change on redmine.org without him. So redmine.org has not changed very much since I was introduced to Redmine about ten years ago. But to the day it's a reliable solution with a hand full of dedicated developers and it's used by many people.

There was a Discord server some time ago which was quite popular in the beginning but it was shut down by its owner quite suddenly. At the moment there's a Slack workspace which was created by some core developers.

Things are getting better but it needs time and dedicated people to bring Redmine to its second spring.

If you thought you would find the level of support you can have in a commercial solution i think you are wrong. Despite the objective problems with redmine.org redmine is alive and healty. The plugins are many and only by installing them you can know if they are right for yo, so it is implied that you must have a redmine instance for evaluation. If you don't have the time or will to do it, maybe redmine is not for you. On the contrary you could have enormous satisfaction.

Bernhard Ganslmeier thanks for the comments and summing up what I was looking for.

lorenzo verna thanks for your comments as well. While they come across a touch hot and defensive, this too is also about what I expected.

If you thought you would find the level of support you can have in a commercial solution i think you are wrong.

Well this is looking pretty evident and practically speaking the root of what I’m asking here. While redmine has survived this long, it doesn’t feel like it’s grown; and I’m specifically talking about the open source community perspective. Go to a Drupal or Wordpress forum and you get practical help and guidance. Go to the redmine forum and ask how to enable HTTPS and you get "You need to install Apache and configure it bro".

The plugins are many and only by installing them you can know if they are right for yo, so it is implied that you must have a redmine instance for evaluation.

While this is half true, my original complaint wasn’t about knowing if a particular plugin was or wasn’t right for me, it was in the ability to discover the existence of those plugins. Obviously if I want to test a plugin I need to install it. It would be ideal if I could filter a list of plugins compatible with 4.2 categorized as “agile” and filtered by paid,free, or freemium. That doesn’t exist, but it seems that isn’t going to change if JPL is the only one with access there still.

If you don't have the time or will to do it, maybe redmine is not for you.

This is gate keeping and apathy speaking. I’m not sure if it’s just you who doesn’t care about getting more people involved or if it’s the communities mentality as a whole, but the thought that people need to just figure it out on their own and if they can’t then maybe it’s not for them is a sh*tty one.

Matthew Connerton wrote:

Bernhard Ganslmeier thanks for the comments and summing up what I was looking for.

You're welcome. One thing I forgot to mention is that I think that the installed base of Redmine is much higher that it looks first. It's support for alternative version control systems (SVN,HG) and the fact that one can install it on premise are also advantages and therefore I think it's quite popular by so called dark matter developers who work on closed source projects. And they're many.

Well this is looking pretty evident and practically speaking the root of what I’m asking here. While redmine has survived this long, it doesn’t feel like it’s grown; and I’m specifically talking about the open source community perspective. Go to a Drupal or Wordpress forum and you get practical help and guidance. Go to the redmine forum and ask how to enable HTTPS and you get "You need to install Apache and configure it bro".

Maybe the average burned out Redmine sysadmin is not as cozy and welcoming as the relaxed, yoga stretched, matcha latte filled Drupal developer. Just a joke. ;-)
There are many nice folks on the Redmine forums who are willing to help and yes, I also think there's room for improvement of some parts of the documentation. Things are slowly getting better.

Oh by the way... Did you know Redmine is quite big in Japan? There's a Redmine conference twice a year which you can also look at on YouTube but you need some Japanese skills. Otherwise you're left with me just looking at the presentations. :-D