What I’ve been working on – February 2010

Since I’m working so much with Redmine and Open Source, I wanted to take a few minutes and post an update about some of the major things I’ve been working on recently.

Redmine LDAP integration

I’ve been working with a client on several new features for Redmine’s LDAP integration. He’s wanting to add a lot more automation for the user management in Redmine so we’ve been doing a lot of integration with LDAP over the past two weeks.

We’re planning to submit these new features back to Redmine in a couple of weeks but I’ve already started on a new plugin that has some of the automation:

  1. Rake Task: Add all of the users found in LDAP to Redmine, optionally adding them to a Redmine group.
  2. Rake Task: Lock (or unlock) any account registered in Redmine with an LDAP connection but not found. (e.g. if a user was removed from LDAP, this will lock their account in Redmine)
  3. A web user interface to “Sync LDAP” which will run both of the above commands
  4. Rake Task: Add the existing Redmine users to a default group (e.g. Everyone should be in the Reporter group)

Some of the Redmine core features we want to submit are:

  1. Automatically adding new users to specific Redmine groups based on their LDAP connection.
  2. Extending the incoming mail handler to check for accounts in LDAP and create them on the fly.
  3. Adding a custom filter for each LDAP connection to refine the user search (e.g. getting all the members of the “Developers” group out of LDAP:
    (&(objectcategory=group)(member=”Developers”))

Redmine Bulk Time Entry plugin

I’m just about done with a new release for the Redmine Bulk Time Entry plugin. I’ve been frantically trying to get all 70+ of my Redmine plugins updated for the 0.9 Redmine release last month. I’m going to be asking for some help to maintain them once I get my first big project of 2010 launched…

See Project Run

I’ve been working hard to get the first of my 12 businesses in 2010 launched, SeeProjectRun. I’m not quite ready to open it up for sign ups yet but I’ve added a form where you can register for a private beta invite. If you’re a freelancer or small technology business, I’ll appreciate it if you could sign up for the beta.

That’s what I’ve been working on lately. It’s stressful and overwhelming at times but a lot of good things are coming out from it.

Eric Davis