Redmine is an open source project management platform written in Ruby and built using the Ruby on Rails framework. It currently supports a lot of key features that a software project manager would find useful, such as an issue track, wiki, time tracking, source control management integration, and various other tools that assist with document and information management.

As the product has gotten more popular, the need to extend the basic functionality through the use of third-party plugins has grown. Redmine facilitates this through a plugin API that assists in hooking external model, view, and controller code into Redmine, as well as integrating with various system features.

This chapter will introduce you to Redmine's plugin structure, as well as how to generate a new plugin, and some preliminary initialization and configuration settings. We will generate a sample plugin that we'll be using throughout this book to illustrate various code samples and topics.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter: