I had not looked at
ProjectPier in a few years. It was fairly buggy, previously. But this has changed.
ProjectPier has been updated and is now relatively bug-free, installs about as easy as WordPress, and the only catch is that it comes by default with an ugly theme that makes the tool look almost worthless. However, you can easily switch over to another theme in the menus as Administration > Configuration > General > Themes. You can also copy in a theme folder into public/assets/themes and then activate it from the Themes menu.
I found it fairly easy to fork a theme. Several themes come by default with the latest version. Marine is a new theme, though, and you can download and install that. Just copy a nice theme like goCollab into a new folder, and then edit dialog.css and rewrites.css. You can use Firebug in Firefox to identify areas to change in CSS and then override them in those two files at the bottom. If you have trouble overriding a value, then stick BODY in front of the value. The icons in goCollab stink in my opinion -- they're unviewable except if you have a microscope. The fix for me was to download the Marine theme from the website, borrow those icons, and overwrite the icons from the forked goCollab theme. But you can take it even further by grabbing the
free Tango icons and changing the CSS as necessary.
From there, it looked fairly easy in the system to add features like:
- Install
osTicket for your clients to file tickets, and then create a flag button in osTicket to make it fire a new Task into ProjectPier.
- Add a tab to have live chat using a table in MySQL to exchange info.
- Add a tab to create, edit, and store invoices per client.
- Add a tab for a calendar.
- Add some jQuery to collapse message and task threading, etc.
- Add git, svn, or cvs connectivity.
etc.
But, anyway, if you do any of those things, please contribute back to the ProjectPier and osTicket community and share your code -- we'd all appreciate it. We're all coders in this forum, but hey, it's the time savings I'm talking about.