This book describes the functionality and capabilities of Redmine, reveals its secrets and gives tips on how to use it. The book contains all the information needed to install, configure, use, and master this application. Redmine is a very powerful and an extremely flexible project management tool and an issue tracker. It's free, open source, built on the popular Ruby on Rails framework and has a strong community.
Chapter 1, Getting Familiar with Redmine, prepares us for the next chapters by briefly going through the Redmine interface concept and reviewing pluggable components of the application.
Chapter 2, Installing Redmine, guides on how to install Redmine in four different ways, each of which is suitable for different purposes.
Chapter 3, Configuring Redmine, reviews the configuration options, which are available in the Settings section of the Administration area and covers the advanced options obscured behind them.
Chapter 4, Issue Tracking, reviews what makes Redmine one of the best issue trackers, also giving heed to the configuration options related to issue tracking.
Chapter 5, Managing Projects, covers the major part of Redmine functionality, which is related to projects, and shows, why this is one of the best applications for project hosting.
Chapter 6, Time Tracking, describes time tracking capabilities of Redmine and guides how to generate time reports.
Chapter 7, Text Formatting, is a comprehensive tutorial for the Redmine rich text formatting syntax, which is based on Textile and gives formatting powers to Redmine's Wiki.
Chapter 8, Access Control and Workflow, is aimed at enlightening the permissions system and the issue life cycle by explaining what is the role, the tracker, the issue status, and how are they connected.
Chapter 9, Personalization, gives hints on how to make Redmine more comfortable for users, and helps users to ensure that important and interesting information will be delivered to them.
Chapter 10, Plugins and Themes, guides on how to find plugins for a particular Redmine version, covers installation of plugins and themes and reviews some interesting plugins.
Chapter 11, Customizing Redmine, shows the power of custom fields and guides how to customize Redmine without breaking upgrade compatibility.
For this book, you need to have access to a Redmine installation (or you will need to install it). It's better (but not required), if you are an administrator of the installation.
The book describes Redmine 2.2.x. However, versions from 1.4.x to 2.1.x should be fine (they just miss some minor functionality).
This book is for anyone, who already uses or plans to use Redmine. But readers should consider, that most reviewed topics are specific to the software industry (while Redmine can be used for other industries as well). As the book also reviews topics, which require privileged access, it will be especially useful for project managers and Redmine administrators. No prior knowledge of Redmine is required.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
<VirtualHost *:80>
RailsEnv production
PassengerAppRoot /opt/redmine/redmine-2.2.0
DocumentRoot /opt/redmine/redmine-2.2.0/public
<Directory "/opt/redmine/redmine-2.2.0/public">
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate $ RAILS_ENV=production rake redmine:load_default_data
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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