Introducing Merlot
During the last couple of months, at Menttes, Silvestre Huens and I have been working on a new development to replace our project management software. The result is Merlot, a web based project management software written in Python using the Grok web framework.
Our short term goal is to replace the system we are using now, which we basically use as a time tracking system. So, time tracking is an important part of Merlot in its current state.
Merlot is under development, but it currently allows you to:
- Create projects and organize projects in tasks
- Associate projects to clients
- Manage projects and tasks statuses
- Track the time worked in tasks and generate reports based on time logs
- Have a set of favorite tasks on a per user basis
- Quickly log time in a task via the quick log feature
Merlot's repository has just been moved to Google Code and licensed under a GPL v2 license. The project is hosted at: http://code.google.com/p/merlot/. In the near future, we are hoping to polish the existing functionality and to add small features to help project planning, like setting priorities to tasks and improving the project view page. Once we get to that point, we plan to release the first version. Beyond that, we don't have a road map, but we probably want Merlot to evolve into a general purpose project management system more than into a methodology specific project management system.
Part of the motivation to start a new development was to build a full application using Grok. When I started to work with Grok, I failed to find real applications fully implemented in Grok. So, besides the software itself, I think that Merlot can be a contribution to the Grok ecosystem in the sense that it is a real, non-trivial application completely built using Grok. We tried to follow best practices as much as possible, we have a good test coverage and we have set a good base for documentation.
Finally, I would like to share some screenshots. This is the dashboard:
The add project view:
And the quick log feature:
As mentioned previously, there are no releases of Merlot yet. However, if you want to run your own instance of Merlot, you can follow the Getting started with development guide from the documentation.
