Hi Pavlik,

sorry it took me/us so long to get back to you. I had had a quick look at bettermeans a while back and found your work interesting and I think it should still be able to work as a plugin or set of plugins. What sort of help would you need to go forth with that?

Hi Felix,

Thank you for the reply! Most of all I would need an advice now and than from someone familiar with redmine/chili internals and resources explaining them. I just started idling on #chiliproject elf-pavlik, so maybe now and than will just ping you there? Even refering me to another person and related documentation should come helpful!

Thank you and looking forward to bringing Bettermeans inline with ChiliProject =)

BTW I just started working with Bettermeans after people who developped it put it back into open source...

https://github.com/Bettermeans/bettermeans/contributors

Oh I don't know this software... It's quite amazing (as I can see on video).

But why doing a plugin ? Many features can be part of the core.
It's not specific features (I think).

All teams can use this features.

Certain things maybe, but the dashboard for example would pin ChiliProject to a certain style of project management, which we don't want to do. There's already plugins extending the "issue" part of ChiliProject like the chiliproject_backlogs plugin, bettermeans could be another one.

I like a possiblity of extracting bettermeans specific functionality as set of plugins, like:

• dashboard - http://help.bettermeans.com/dashboard
• retrospectives - http://help.bettermeans.com/retros
• motions - http://help.bettermeans.com/motions
  and maybe others and than 'package' it as sort of 'distro' (similar like for example drupal based Open Atrium)

still will need to chew on it bit more and learn more about chili plugins systems...

I don't understand the problem with adding some optional feature into the core.

Plugin was very useful in Redmine because J-P Lang don't want to add many patch and feature. I hope that it's not the same with ChiliProject.

In my experience, way of doing plugin for Chili or Redmine are very problematic : some core code are overwrite by plugin and insert some version-specific code.
More problematic, some plugins "basic" can be in conflicting together.

Chiliproject can be a Redmine++ if it add great feature that are in some obscure plugin in redmine.

Of course, this features must not change the possibility to work as now. But that's not because you don't want to work with a "certain style of project management" that you mustn't add this possibility in the software.
If you don't do, maybe we will have another fork (like bettermeans is)

• some enterprises specific features (using a paying service, proprietary development etc)
• proposing and test way of working with CP. If it work and give the opportunity to use CP for new purposes, it must be add into the core.
• specific customization for Systems integrator

• CP will begin to be a feature-full software for many task (and not only software development... which is a very limited task for a great software like CP)
• Many actual plugin developers will work on the CP core and give a boost to the software.
• The new features will attract users from redmine and giving good point to use it instead of redmine or other software.

I hope we can talk about it and sorry to Palvik elf for this non-bettemeans talking...

hi guilhem,

as i said i don't know at this moment specifics of plugin architecture in chili/redmine, in general i like keeping core light with only common functionality, and whatever possible comes with plugins...

could you share some examples of what you have found problematic to accomplish with plugin system and what changes to core would solve it? i tend to learn a lot from practical examples =)

thanks!

btw, i would really appreciate if someone adds infrmation about developing plugins here:
https://www.chiliproject.org/projects/chiliproject/wiki/Plugin_Development

=)

an example is this plugin :
https://github.com/kulesa/redmine_better_gantt_chart

It add really "basic" feature but really useful.

You can check how it's working, it's quite a simple plugin.