Fleventum

My Fleventum project has begun. This has been a goal of mine for a while now, and active development has begun. The road ahead is not easy though, as my goals are fairly lofty.

Before getting into my goals for this project, let's discuss the history. A little over a year ago, I was asked to research issue tracking software for my company IT department. We had previously been using an extremely limited in-house product. Naturally, I first went looking for open-source products. There are quite a few out there, Bugzilla, Trac, Mantis, but none of them really were what I was looking for. I looked at some commercial offerings and liked quite a bit about Jira, but it is very expensive, especially for the full-featured enterprise version. I eventually came across Eventum from MySQL. I liked that it was written in PHP, and a cursory glance at the source led me to believe that I could easily tweak it to my heart's content. So we decided upon Eventum and I spent a couple weeks working on migrating our existing data to it, and adding a bit of functionality to it.

Six months later, a new version of Eventum was released and I realized that merging its changes with mine would be very difficult. So, we are "stuck" with the version we have. We like the version we have. It is but a few tweaks away from being a very nice product for our needs. It has been my experience that issue tracking isn't quite as "one-size-fits-all" as the vendors of expensive commercial versions might lead you to believe. The needs of a 10 developer shop are quite different than of a 50-developer shop and different from an open-source project.

But, I continue to hear gripings from managers and other types about our current system. Occassionally the sentiment becomes "Jira would fix that". I often ask that desired improvements should be noted and I should be given another couple days to make them at some point, but these requests are often unanswered.

Eventually I though, hey, wouldn't it be great if there was something that combined the best features of Eventum and Jira and was open-source (or at least much cheaper)? And thus Fleventum was born.