Show HN: Self-hosted project management application

by chintanb • 12 years ago

135 81 12 years ago

Deusdies3• 12 years ago

This looks exactly like something I've been looking for!

Curious, what kind of database (if any) backend is it using? If it's not using MySQL or anything heavy like that, I'm sold!

NSAID• 12 years ago

From the GitHub readme:

Minimum Server Requirements

PHP 5.4 or greater

PDO PHP extendsion

MCrypt PHP extendsion

GD PHP library

MySql Database

If your webserver is running Apache then mod_rewrite should be installed

chintanb3• 12 years ago

Let me know what kind of database you want to use ? I might be able to help you out.

Deusdies3• 12 years ago

sqlite would be great, or some NoSQL solution such as Mongo (though I see as that being less likely).

cpfohl• 12 years ago

I'd love to see a live demo of this...

chintanb3• 12 years ago

let me know your email and would set up a demo account for you to test.

ProAm4• 12 years ago

Where can I email you at? I'd love to demo this as well.

johnward8• 12 years ago

Is "self hosted" considered a positive or negative these days? It seems like there is a small niche that still wants control over their data but everyone else seems ok with the cloud.

daigoba66• 12 years ago

I consider it a plus.

If I were developing a product like this, I'd build it for self hosting and charge a nominal cost plus yearly a maintenance/support subscription. Then you could deploy the same product yourself and offer it "as a service" for a monthly subscription. Atlassian does this for many of their products.

johnward8• 12 years ago

I skipped over the free part too. Makes sense to be free and self hosted but this would also be cool as a "deploy to heroku" (or whatever cloud PaaS provider officially supports php). I still wonder if the creator has plans to monetize it?

johnward8• 12 years ago

Also as for the business model you've mentioned. I've seen this done in competitive spaces like affiliate marketing. If you don't know most affiliates are super paranoid about thier data as leaking info about a campaign can lead to tons of copies and there goes your revenue. They seem to mostly prefer self hosted apps. Imobitrax offers a self hosted paid tracking system with a monthly fee. A lot of people used to use the free prosper202 self hosted tracking system too. Now recently I'm seeing a shift where people are not afraid to use cloud systems like voluum. I'm not sure what is causing the acceptance to change. It could just be that everything is cloud hosted now so people are getting used to the idea.

The problem I see with paid self hosted PHP apps, in this case, is that they are often using ioncube obfuscation and then if I can't read the source how do I know my data is more secure than a cloud provider?

23andwalnut2• 12 years ago

I built a similar project management app (http://duetapp.com) and people love the fact that it's self hosted. This segment of the market is definitely smaller than the segment that prefers SaaS, but it's bigger than you might imagine.

michelutti2• 12 years ago

Hey! I have always one doubt about this type of product (pay once). How do you distribute your source font, as well the installer to your customer? Do you use another software for a restricted area to download? Or is the download open to anyone, but you have to offer a license key to run the app?

marveller• 12 years ago

Nice app. Just a question about "Free updates for a year", what's the cost after a year?

ProAm4• 12 years ago

It's definitely a positive, especially for enterprise. The cloud for enterprise means your' depending on people who dont know to do a good job, and it means you spend 3x as much time communicating vs getting work done.

johnward8• 12 years ago

I don't know. I work for an enterprise company and we're coming around to the idea of putting things in the cloud. I actually think the people running cloud hosted software are more of an expert in the software and devops than the people inside your organization in a lot of cases. Plus large enterprises have so much bloat that it can be way more expensive and time consuming to launch something internally. The biggest issue seems to be that these companies are still afraid of who controls their data.

stephenr5• 12 years ago

While some people will seemingly climb over their own mother in their rush to hand over their personal and business data to every man and his dog, some of us still have our sanity.

Having it available as self hosted doesn't exclude the possibility that the author or another company will offer it as a service. The reverse is often not true.

michaelmior• 12 years ago

The terminology is perhaps a little messy, but I think "self hosted" and "in the cloud" are not necessarily mutually exclusive. On one hand, "in the cloud" can mean a SaaS platform where your data is locked in and you have no control over the application. However, I could also own the code and data and host an application myself "in the cloud."

This is the ideal compromise to me. I can own my data and the application, but I don't necessarily have to deal with all the annoying details of managing my own servers.

johnward8• 12 years ago

Yeah when I said "cloud" I really meant SaaS. You can certainly deploy a self hosted app to a "cloud" PaaS and get a greater ability to control your data than SaaS while still getting many of the other benefits a SaaS service offers.

drewcrawford• 12 years ago

I'm working on a self-hosted product.

My market research suggests that the market for hosted products is much larger but the market for self-hosted products these days is underserved.

There are people who for various reasons refuse to use any hosted product (legal issue, boss said no, etc.) and depending on the competitive landscape they may not have any other options than buying your product. This produces a captive audience.

imdsm• 12 years ago

Offer self-hosting for a single fee (or for free), and offer hosted for a monthly price. That seems to be the trend.

aw3c2• 12 years ago

Free 5 minute grumpy feedback on the landing page :)

Requires Javascript to display anything for no good reason. After enabling it and reloading it takes more than 10 seconds to anything but the loading icon to appear. When I quickly scroll down to see what's there, there is nothing, then it fades in. Screenshots are tiny. When I click them they jump into my face. FAQ is hard to impossible to read with the color combination and font and centering. On the whole page I have no idea what is a link and what is not. FAQ items take me back to the top when I click them. Requiring a mail address for downloading (free?!) software is a no-no for me. The buttons at the bottom (fb, twitter etc) have no anchors set so if I hover them, I have no idea what clicking will do. I would not want them to open my mail client or something. No idea what the rightmost icon even means.

92five app by Chintan Banugaria is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons are not for programs. Please choose AGPL or something like that for code.

You waste a lot of vertical space, I would suggest putting elements of the top-most part of the side closer together and maybe strip some text like this: http://i.imgur.com/9MjNLvy.png That way the full screenshot has a better chance to appear on the page.

Writing:

Don't use slashes when you can use a word instead. "No-one can see / access your todos." could be "No-one can see or access your todos.". You are using "to-do" elsewhere which I prefer. I would recommend also using "To-Dos" in that header.

You say "I am sure you will love the design.". I would not use "I" in that page unless you introduce yourself first.

Also spotted "Yes its free." -> "Yes, it's free."!

-----

The praise is hidden here! The product itself looks slick and useful. Personally I am not a fan of flat design but you seem to have pulled it off nicely. Self-hosted tools are the best, thanks for doing that! I really really really suggest you make the landing page less annoying though. :P

johnward8• 12 years ago

I agree with the JS critique. I actually thought something was wrong when it didn't load. I'm not sure the loading time is worth it for those pop-in effects as they aren't really necessary. Also I'm 28 with pretty good vision but I'm having a hard time with that lime green on white.

Smudge• 12 years ago

Yeah I found that loading indicator bizarre. What am I waiting for? Is it circumventing the browser's rendering engine and doing it all in canvas or something? (I mean, I know it's not, that would be silly. It's more likely having to make multiple network requests to fetch the rest of the content.)

I can understand the other javascript-ey bits as forgoing some amount of UX/usability in exchange for flashier visuals. But the loading indicator on initial page load just doesn't make sense to me.

reitanqild2• 12 years ago

The intent of the license (no derivatives) seems very different from AGPL (strong copyleft).

Please don't recommend AGPL uncritically. Not everyone cares to think through the implications (yes, I have had that discussion with someone who told me was fine about me using his AGPL licensed program in a clearly non-AGPL compliant way because it was just GPL3 but for the web. I Had to find another solution.)

tjsix• 12 years ago

I think this app has potential but after installing a local copy and playing with it for a few minutes there are a few things right off the bat that are a bit of an issue:

First, creating a project doesn't work, after putting in the required info and clicking create I'm taken to an error page with no feedback as to what actually happened, even though the screen says 'something went wrong and we've noted that'. Also, requiring to add collaborators even if it's yourself is redundant, this shouldn't be required.

Tasks - The main tasks screen really isn't useful at all since each 'Task' takes up a huge amount of space, and all the links on the task card don't do anything, and even when sub-tasks are entered they don't show on the card. This section really seems like it should be tied into projects, not a standalone section, especially since there's a 'Todos' section as well.

In many places where input is required, it's not immediately apparent that the colored title area is editable or requires input.

There's quite a few little UI tweaks that need to be made, for instance the line height in the quick notes section on the dashboard does not match the notebook lines, so typing anything in there looks sloppy.

skimmas• 12 years ago

Whoooa and it even runs on a macbook. sorry but I can't help but feeling screenshots inside "macs" look cheesy.

newman8r• 12 years ago

Seems like it's getting overloaded right now as I just get a loading animation for 20+ seconds.

I will take a look at this later though.

I have been liking scrumdo which also allows you to self-host the application (in addition to offering to host it for you - which is their profit model)

BorisMelnik3• 12 years ago

I'm really impressed from what I see. Would love an excuse to not spend $200/month on project management software :)

I use a very popular SaaS right now but would actually rather self-host (I like to own my data.)

Haven't had a chance to install it yet but from from the look of it and general feedback I could see my company making a switch if it all checks out.

I don't need responsiveness, HTML 5, a mobile app or any of that. Just gimme something that works!

claar• 12 years ago

What SaaS do you currently use for project management?

BorisMelnik3• 12 years ago

I didn't want to say here, but Basecamp. And I have absolutely nothing against them but I wouldn't mind saving a grand or two every year if this can do the same thing and hold up to a dozen or so users.

ProAm4• 12 years ago

This looks great.

qmaxquique• 12 years ago

I just created a demo installation of 92fiveapp at Terminal.com. You just need to spin up a new container using this snapshot: https://terminal.com/tiny/yTUnxPVAiz

iamshs• 12 years ago

That was helpful. Even though the site required login, but well appreciated.

notduncansmith2• 12 years ago

Took 15 seconds to load the landing page. Honestly, you lost me as a user after the first 5 but I wanted to see the rest of the page.

Scrolled to the bottom quickly, had to wait for it to animate in so I was staring at a blank page for a few seconds.

Can't be bothered to try the product, since I'll be old and gray by the time it boots.

jiggy20112• 12 years ago

It's probably loading slowly because being linked on HN is giving the server too much traffic. It's self hosted anyway, so that doesn't really matter.

notduncansmith2• 12 years ago

It does really matter - the landing page loads 1.9MB of content. This is easily 10x the size one should expect from a landing page. It's reasonable to assume that the app itself would follow similar proportions, and that means (most likely) load times upwards of 45 seconds. No thanks.

dba7dba• 12 years ago

Loaded fine for me. Rest of site looks good.

Will definitely try this out. May sound strange to others but I could use a project management software, even though I'm a one man project operation...

jotm• 12 years ago

Looks great, has potential: nice design, self hosted, responsive UI, open source. Maybe create a companion offline app for smartphones/tablets that would sync with the server?

M4v3R• 12 years ago

I would really love to see some good self-hosted Basecamp killer. This is getting close, but lacks Basecamp's most important feature (at least for me): discussions. This is something that we are using A LOT, and no other software even comes close to what Basecamp has to offer in that area.

calgoo• 12 years ago

Im currently working on something similar, but focused on the tasks more.

Its like a mix of a project manager and a timesheets portal. The front page contains your list of active tasks for the day, and any sticky tasks that you have. The team leader can assign tasks from projects to individual users, and be able to see the current project assigned time, and set threshold for hours spent / left.

Project managers will also be able to assign projects to teams, and also see current progress of tasks completed, time spent on tasks etc.

I was also thinking of distributing it as a self hosted open source app and maybe a hosted solution as well. For something like this, what would the recomended license be? Something like AGPL or BSD? How would any of you release the software, and if I would like to offer a hosted service in the future, would you worry of others using your software and selling the service as well?

reitanqild2• 12 years ago

AGPL feels toxic to me. At least add a commercial option then.

I'm working on something myself and my contributions to open source has so far been in sending and getting accepted a few pull requests with improved docs on one project and improvements to some javascript library as well as sneding a few bucks to a couple of projects that takes donations.

Haven't release anything serious yet but I know if I do it will be permissive because at the moment I'm giving it away I want it to be as useful as possible and not tied up. (Unless I want to run some dual licensing scheme. ; )

cellover7• 12 years ago

Interesting project!

I'm currently working on a green field project with a very small team on my free time, so I installed 92five on my server and will be testing it "as if in production".

I will add any issues I encounter on their Github - https://github.com/chintanbanugaria/92five

simonswords82• 12 years ago

The app looks great, but how are you going to make money from this so you can sustain it?

guidedlight• 12 years ago

Okay, I was just reading through the landing page. Here are my thoughts:

* I'm not sure that 'self hosted' needs to be mentioned in the heading. You don't mention cloud or SaaS anywhere and have a big 'download' button so it should be obvious without stating it.

* "92five app covers all the basic project management features". Don't say your product is basic, the features should rock.

* Responsive. Yawn. Most managers don't know what this means. You don't mention 'mobile' anywhere in this section.

* Built with. This is the stuff you're interested in, and it's important but it has nothing to do with the product. Most users wouldn't care whether it's PHP, Java or Basic.

* Screenshots. Great we are past the techie bits and back to the actual product... But I don't know what I'm looking at.

* Wow, it's free! That's the best part and you mentioned it last... and in the FAQ. This should be up the top of the page!

I hope this helps.

liotier• 12 years ago

Wow, it's free

It is not free - you can't make derivatives. It is just free of cost.

cellover7• 12 years ago

I have setup a demo env for those interested:

http://92fivedemo.pilgrimbreak.com/

Email: demoguest@92fivedemo.com

Password: 12346#0azeRtu

I'll keep it up for 1 or 2 days.

k3oni2• 12 years ago

I can't seem to be able to access your demo: "This webpage is not available" .

cellover7• 12 years ago

I had no problem connecting. Did you disable javascript?

k3oni2• 12 years ago

Working now, thanks.

sharth2• 12 years ago

Yeah. I just screwed it up. Apparently you can suspend your own user account.

Which is an incredibly useful option.

AndrewKemendo• 12 years ago

Very helpful thanks!

Seems like a pretty intuitive interface with decent metrics. Pretty close to the sweet spot between too simple and too hard.

cellover7• 12 years ago

I just deactivated the demo. Hope everyone had time to test the app!

chintanb3• 12 years ago

Guys, 92fiveapp is on github Visit https://github.com/chintanbanugaria/92five

Show HN: Self-hosted project management application

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