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I’ve just released an update to Timesheet plugin for Redmine.

Changes

There are a few minor updates in this release, I fixed one bug in the calendar popup and have redesigned the form to use the screen real estate better.

• Feature #710: Wrap all common elements in fieldsets
• Feature #1223: Cleanup the Filter UI to not use as much screen space.
• Bug #1267: No action taken on selection of date

You can see more details on the Activity and Roadmap pages.

Upgrade

As part of my infatuation with git, this project is now hosted on GitHub.

Zip

1. Download the latest zip file from https://projects.littlestreamsoftware.com
2. Unzip the file to your Redmine into vendor/plugins
3. Restart your Redmine

Git

1. Open a shell to your Redmine’s vendor/plugins/timesheet_plugin folder
2. Update your Git copy with git pull
3. Restart your Redmine

SVN

To migrate from the svn copy to the git copy you will need to remove the plugin and reinstall it. Just remove the vendor/plugins/timesheet_plugin directory and follow the directions below.

Install

If you are installing a fresh copy, follow these steps:

1. Download the plugin. There are three supported ways:

   • Downloading the latest archive file from Little Stream Software projects

   • Checkout the source from Git

     cd vendor/plugins/ && git clone git://github.com/edavis10/redmine-timesheet-plugin.git timesheet_plugin

   • Install it using Rail’s plugin installer

     script/plugin install git://github.com/edavis10/redmine-timesheet-plugin.git

2. Install the plugin as described at http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/Plugins. (this plugin doesn’t require migration).

3. Login to your Redmine install as an Administrator.
4. Enable the “Run Timesheet” permissions for your Roles.
5. Add the “Timesheet module” to the enabled modules for your project.
6. The link to the plugin should appear on that project’s navigation.

What’s next

Since I don’t have the time to add a bunch of new features, I’m going to work with the Redmine core developers and try to migrate the Timesheet plugin’s features into the Redmine core.

Help

If you need help you can leave a comment here or enter an issue directly into my bug tracker.

Eric

RailsConf 2008 is over and I’ve had some time to rest and recollect my thoughts on the sessions. Below is a quick summary of the main ideas I picked up in each session.

Friday 5/30/2008 (Day 1)

• Joel Spolsky keynote - The UI should help the user.
• Entrepreneurs on Rails - Work will always come in feast or famine cycles. It’s how you learn to deal with it that will determine your success.
• Hosting and the Woes - Caching is the key. Modern servers are powerful enough to handle a large load with some basic optimization and common sense.
• Faster better ORM with DataMapper - DataMapper shows that the Rails way is not the only way, we have the freedom to choose what tool will work best.
• The Profitable Programmer - You only have to spend one day a week to work on your idea. That’s how Peepcode was started.
• Microapps for Fun and Profit - Take a day off and build an application. Nothing is better for a developer than to create something new and show it off to the world.

Saturday 5/31/2008 (Day 2)

• Jeremy Kemper Keynote - Rails is improving at an impressive rate with the community support.
• Using Git to Manage and Deploy Rails Apps - Git is flexible and stupid simple once you get the underlying concepts. I’ve seen wikis and backup systems using git as the file storage.
• Advanced RESTful Rails - Sometimes the relationship between data should be the resource, not just the data itself.
• Lightning Talks - Didn’t really get much from the Lightning talks.
• Integration Testing with RSpec’s Story Runner - Doing full stack testing is really useful to check the interactions between discrete components but it isn’t easy or maintainable.
• Meta-programming and Ruby Internals for Rails Programmers - A deep understanding of your runtime environment will make you a better programmer.

Sunday 6/1/2008 (Day 3)

• “Design Patterns” in Ruby - Many of the “Design Patterns” in other languages can be trivially implemented using Ruby’s built in language constructs.
• Advanced Mongrel: Handlers and Plugins - Since Mongrel is written in Ruby, it can be easily extended using Ruby. This is an easy way to bypass the Rails stack.
• Oh the Fail I’ve Known - Failure is the best teacher so we all need to hurry up and fail our first 50 times.
• Building an App in 48 Hours, A Rails Rumble Case Study - 48 hours is a long crunch time and near the end many bad mistakes are made, predominately around testing.
• Rails Core Panel - Releasing Rails is taking longer to because testers are waiting for a release but the core needs edge tested more before hand.

I’ll be digging into a few of these topics over time. I’m looking to do some more with Microapps, Git, and meta-programming.

Eric

I went to two tutorial tracks yesterday, Refactoring Your Rails Application and Refactotum: Contributing to Open Source.

Refactoring Your Rails Application

Refactoring Your Rails Application was good presentation by Zach Dennis and Drew Colthorp. It was great to see how some advanced Rails developers do some advanced refactorings but I got lost as they rushed through the examples. I’m still on a 1.6 GHz Pentium M so RSpec doesn’t run as fast as on the shiny MacBooks. I think the best benefit is the 70 page PDF they sent out that has details about doing several more refactorings. I’ll be using it later to clean up some of my old code.

Refactotum: Contributing to Open Source

I really enjoyed this session. I didn’t know going into it but a Refactotum is basically a large peer programming event where code is written for Open Source projects. So for about half the session the presentors talked about using several tools to check Rails code for areas that need improvement and used the other half to go around and help everyone try to create a patch for an Open Source Rails project. One thing I really learned was: you don’t have to contribute by sending in a new feature or bug fix, often some additional unit tests or refactoring is a much needed contribution.

Some tools they talked about:

• RCov
• Flog
• tarantula
• Git - Not Ruby specific but works great will all Open Source projects.

Friday Schedule

Today’s schedule is going to be a lot more busy, since this is the first day of the real conference. If you are going to any of the events or sessions below, check for me there:

• 9:15am - 10:15am Joel Spolsky keynote
• 10:45am - 11:35am Entrepreneurs On Rails
• 11:45am - 12:35pm Hosting and the Woes
• 1:50pm - 2:40pm Faster, Better, ORM with DataMapper
• 2:50pm - 3:40pm The Profitable Programmer: Creating Successful Side Projects
• 4:25pm - 5:15pm Microapps for Fun and profit
• 7:40pm - 8:00pm Ruby Heroes Award Ceremony
• 8:00pm - 9:00pm David Heinemeier Hansson keynote

Eric

RailsConf 2008 officially starts tomorrow and I’m all ready to go. If you want to look for me, look for the Rails developer who doesn’t have a Mac (I have an older Dell).

Thursday Schedule

• 7:30am - 8:00am Continental Breakfast
• 8:30am - 12:00pm Refactoring Your Rails Application
• 1:30pm - 5:00pm Refactotum: Contributing to Open Source

I’ll try to post updates here and to Twitter as the conference progresses.

Eric

I’m happy to announce that I’m finally Open Sourcing my Redmine Customer plugin. This is the plugin that I use to track my customer information for each project in Redmine.

Features

For this first release, I implemented the most basic features.

• Store Customer data
• Associate a Customer for each project
• Permissions to control user access to data

Install

1. Download the archive file and extract it to your vendor/plugins folder. You can also download directly from GitHub using git:

    git clone git://github.com/edavis10/redmine-customer-plugin.git vendor/plugins/customer_plugin
   

2. Follow the Redmine plugin installation steps. Make sure to install Engines 2 if you use Rails 2.0.

3. Setup the database using the migrations.

    rake db:migrate_plugins
   

4. Login to your Redmine install as an Administrator

5. Setup the permissions for your roles
6. Add the “Customer module” to the enabled modules for your project
7. The link to the plugin should appear on that project’s navigation as Customer

Help

If you need help you can leave a comment here or enter an issue directly into my bug tracker.

Eric