For a long time, I used to think about roadmaps as lists of features that are to be built at a reasonable timeframe. Once published, I felt committed to pursuing that plan. Combine that with our limited capacity in the early years (less than ten people working on the product), and you'll understand why ...
Product • • 3 min read
ActiveCollab 1.0 was released more than twelve years ago, and we have documented a detailed list of changes for almost all releases since then. Despite that heritage and experience, it has become tough to map a particular set of changes to a particular version in the past couple of months.Our development ...
Product • • 5 min read
How to do simple yet useful sprint reportingPreviously, I wrote how to delegate responsibilities and automated reports I receive from my VPs. Now, here’s an actual example of a report, so you can see how it works in real life. The example is related to the agile reporting and how I stay updated on ...
Project Management • • 3 min read
Easier token issuing and authenticationWe're happy to announce that ActiveCollab API wrapper for PHP is hitting version 3.0, bringing easier token issuing and authentication. Token issuingThere are now two authenticators that make the authentication a lot easier. To grab a token for one of your ActiveCollab ...
Labs • • 2 min read
How a small, two-hour investment can save hundreds of hoursIt took me a couple of hours, but I managed to automate two big processes:Migrating extremely big ActiveCollab accounts (which can take more than 24 hours);Integrating with translation services.Before the automation, I had to manually migrate ...
Labs • • 3 min read
PHP7 has a release date set: it’s November 12. As always, some of our users will stick to PHP5 for a while before upgrading and others will switch to v7 as soon as it becomes available. To make sure that ActiveCollab is not broken on v7, we started playing with it a bit earlier.For performance and ...
Labs • • 3 min read
The auto-upgrade feature that we introduced in ActiveCollab 3.3 changed the way people manage their self-hosted installations.It also gave us the means to ship improvements and bug fixes without overwhelming our customers with excess maintenance work. Thanks to auto-upgrade we shipped a lot of releases ...
Product • • 2 min read
We rebuilt ActiveCollab Project Management Software (codename Feather) to make it more user-friendly.Here’s the technology we used on backend, frontend, our infrastructure and everything else.Front-EndWe use Angular as a basis for Feather front-end. The choice wasn’t random, and we did a lot of experimenting ...
Labs • • 4 min read
Having everyone on the same page is why project collaboration tools are so useful to teams. Because of this, it's very important to decide how people are notified about updates. There are three things to consider when looking for an optimal solution:1. Which events are significant enough to justify the ...
Design • • 4 min read
In broad strokes, the interaction with web and data on the web evolved in three stages. First, there were HTML files (hyper)linking to one another. Then came the tempting age - a user sends a request, web applications processes it and sends out the rendered page based on a template filled with data fetched ...
Labs • • 3 min read
ActiveCollab 4 has several ways of categorizing and organizing tasks: milestones, labels, categories, and up to three custom fields.After milestones were renamed to task lists and promoted to the primary way of task categorization, it was time to think how we can make tracking the extra bits of task ...
Product • • 3 min read
Naming features may seem trivial, but it's definitely not an easy task. Getting the right name is hard but once you name a feature a certain way you end up with something that guides you in the future and affects your development decisions.What we learned is that you should keep the name as generic as ...
Product • • 3 min read
