unofficial aC LogoI’ve been looking for an open source application that I can use to manage my projects and after a review of the current popular options I’ve chosen activeCollab. ActiveCollab is written by Ilija Studen who based the system on Basecamp, 37Signals’ popular project management and collaboration tool.

After I installed and became acquainted with the system I realised that it was lacking something that I needed urgently; the ability to attach a thread of comments to individual tasks for the purpose of issue tracking.

After reading around the activeCollab forum it’s apparent that this feature will be out in the next release (1.0) but there is no clear date when this will be. This is understandable as Ilija is currently busy working on more important and time consuming aspects of the application like plugin support (which I’m looking forward to!).

Since Ilija has already added the ability to attach ‘comments on anything’ at the system level, a straightforward hack was needed to bring that functionality to the front end.

I’ve provided the hacked files below for anyone that wants them. They are only to be used as a temporary solution and will be superseded by activeCollab 1.0 which will feature task commenting by default.

Instructions

  1. Download the zip file
  2. ac_071-task_comments_hack.zip Downloads: 5697 times
  3. Backup and then replace the following files
    1. /application/controllers/TaskController.class.php
    2. /application/models/project_tasks/ProjectTask.class.php
    3. /application/views/task/task_list.php
  4. Add /application/views/task/task_details.php
  5. Navigate to the task list page
  6. Click on a task’s text to access commenting