What is the best way to achieve task grouping? Coming from Basecamp I was organizing projects into task groups. For example developing a SW program "Program 1" consisting of code modules "Module 1" and "Module 2" - I would create a new Project called "Program 1 Development" with 2 task groups "Code" and "Documentation", then 2 tasks "Module 1" and "Module 2" under each task group. P.S. LOVE Clocking IT - such a good application with so much functionality - can't wait until I am more familiar with it and can use it to it's full potential. Thankyou to the Authors for sharing.
There are currently four ways of achieving this, depending a bit on how detailed reporting and such you want:
Create a project "Program 1 Development", tasks called "Code" and "Documentation", and add to-do's "Module 1" and "Module 2" to the tasks. Create a Project "Program 1 Development", and milestones "Code" and "Documentation", and add tasks "Module 1" and "Module 2". Create a Project "Program 1 Development", and add tasks "Module 1" and "Module 2" with tags "Code" or "Documentation" Create a client "Program 1 Development", and add projects for "Code" and "Documentation", and tasks "Module 1" and "Module 2"
I've been thinking a lot about reviving my task-groups lately, so there might be a 5th and maybe more intuitive way of doing this later on. :-)
You can also make one task depend on another and it groups them nicely in the list view. I love that feature and would love even more if we could have drag and drop in the list view to create these relationships. Yahoo have some ajax libraries to do this sort of drag and drop which might be useful.
The problem with that kind of drag and drop (I've tried it several times) is that it gets unbearably slow when you have many possible drop targets. It works find for a trivial amount of tasks, but the more you get the slower it gets until it pretty much is unusable.
I still haven't given up on it, but I really need to rethink the view for sorting tasks that way.
I have seen a couple of other task management systems with drag and drop that did seem to work OK for 20-30 items, but granted, I didn't try more. I have also seen another system which used control-arrow to have the same effect (move selected item up/down one row). Plus as an added bonus, control-right indented the task (making it dependent on the previous task). That feature was brilliant since it made the tool work as an outliner.
Not only the tasks could be treated in this way, but also the todo items under the task.
I was only looking at this the other day for a project I am working on, but Yahoo have some performance notes which you may have already seen. I notice that your DOM can get very deep on some pages.
It's not the dragging that's the main problem, but rather that for it to be useful it'd be a nested tree with lots of overlapping droppables. Finding the right one you're hovering over takes Prototype quite a while when there are many elements involved.
I've looked at optimizing it / changing the way I do thins from time to time, but haven't found a good and workable solution just yet.
Great tool Erlend, hope you find a way to move tasks around quickly.... even being able to select a bunch of tasks at once and say assign to person or move to project would be great rathen then opening each task one by one and changing those properties.
I've thought about doing something like that lately, and I think it might be doable if I introduce a right-click popup menu. We'll see what happens when I'm done with the permissions interface rewrite.
