Managing software projects with GForge

In my last post I
 touched on effective communication among members of a development team. That post also provides a bridge 
 to today’s subject, a system called GForge.

Origins

The goal of the open-source GForge project is to provide a tool
 that makes a software project easier for its team to develop, whether they’re developers, managers, testers, 
 technical writers or others. GForge grew out of the successful and widely used SourceForge project 
 from VA Software. VA Software stopped developing SourceForge in the open 
 and moved to SourceForge Enterprise Edition, 
 which is a paid product.

Version 2.6.1 of the SourceForge code was forked, 
 and that fork became GForge. To avoid confusion, GForge isn’t 
 a public platform that hosts projects for free like freshmeat.net or 
 sourceforge.net.

GForge inherits its functionality from SourceForge, but is simpler than its predecessor 
 and has been reworked in some areas to make it as easy to install as possible. 
 New features were added, and the authors plan to add more. The 
 company GForge Group was formed to provide
 commercial services such as training, support and installation.

Features

If I had to name GForge’s most important feature, it would be
 its comprehensive software project management, which makes projects easier to develop and maintain. For each project
 you decide to manage with it, GForge offers these features.

• Tracking of basic information such as programming language, platform and number of developers
• Project administration
• Public and private discussion forums
• A mailing list
• Documentation management
• CVS integration
• Project subcategories for issues and tracking, feature requests, fixes and more
• Management of project tasks such as compilation, testing and writing documentation

There’s more, of course. You can create your own project subcategories. Each registered 
 member can use a personal inbox to follow assigned tasks, discussion threads 
 they care about, the status of bug fixes, and so on. Managing members is a subject 
 in its own right. You can track activity and skills, among other things.

GForge has a web interface, so you use it through a browser. Anyone with access
 to the web server running GForge can register and start 
 actively contributing to a project.

Deployment and installation

The GForge core is written in PHP. In addition to
 GForge itself, you’ll need PHP, Apache, PostgreSQL and a Linux system to run it all. Don’t be put off by
 Linux. The installation guide is fairly detailed. With very little experience I managed 
 to install it twice, first on SuSE and then on Mandrake.

My only trouble was with the scripts Cron runs, since I didn’t know where to put them. Many 
 thanks to Ieník for his help.

The GForge interface has been localized into perhaps twenty languages. Czech is missing, but 
 nothing stops anyone from creating and adding it. You can configure GForge in several ways, from changing
 its appearance to deciding which sections to show, such as the snippet library or trove map.

Conclusion

GForge could provide the tools you need to manage software projects. From
 my perspective as a developer, it does. I don’t know of an alternative to compare it with, 
 but GForge is certainly worth trying.