Having it available as self hosted doesn't exclude the possibility that the author or another company will offer it as a service. The reverse is often not true.
If I were developing a product like this, I'd build it for self hosting and charge a nominal cost plus yearly a maintenance/support subscription. Then you could deploy the same product yourself and offer it "as a service" for a monthly subscription. Atlassian does this for many of their products.
The problem I see with paid self hosted PHP apps, in this case, is that they are often using ioncube obfuscation and then if I can't read the source how do I know my data is more secure than a cloud provider?
My market research suggests that the market for hosted products is much larger but the market for self-hosted products these days is underserved.
There are people who for various reasons refuse to use any hosted product (legal issue, boss said no, etc.) and depending on the competitive landscape they may not have any other options than buying your product. This produces a captive audience.
This is the ideal compromise to me. I can own my data and the application, but I don't necessarily have to deal with all the annoying details of managing my own servers.
http://92fivedemo.pilgrimbreak.com/
Email: demoguest@92fivedemo.com
Password: 12346#0azeRtu
I'll keep it up for 1 or 2 days.
Seems like a pretty intuitive interface with decent metrics. Pretty close to the sweet spot between too simple and too hard.
Which is an incredibly useful option.
Requires Javascript to display anything for no good reason. After enabling it and reloading it takes more than 10 seconds to anything but the loading icon to appear. When I quickly scroll down to see what's there, there is nothing, then it fades in. Screenshots are tiny. When I click them they jump into my face. FAQ is hard to impossible to read with the color combination and font and centering. On the whole page I have no idea what is a link and what is not. FAQ items take me back to the top when I click them. Requiring a mail address for downloading (free?!) software is a no-no for me. The buttons at the bottom (fb, twitter etc) have no anchors set so if I hover them, I have no idea what clicking will do. I would not want them to open my mail client or something. No idea what the rightmost icon even means.
> 92five app by Chintan Banugaria is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Creative Commons are not for programs. Please choose AGPL or something like that for code.
You waste a lot of vertical space, I would suggest putting elements of the top-most part of the side closer together and maybe strip some text like this: http://i.imgur.com/9MjNLvy.png That way the full screenshot has a better chance to appear on the page.
Writing:
Don't use slashes when you can use a word instead. "No-one can see / access your todos." could be "No-one can see or access your todos.". You are using "to-do" elsewhere which I prefer. I would recommend also using "To-Dos" in that header.
You say "I am sure you will love the design.". I would not use "I" in that page unless you introduce yourself first.
Also spotted "Yes its free." -> "Yes, it's free."!
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The praise is hidden here! The product itself looks slick and useful. Personally I am not a fan of flat design but you seem to have pulled it off nicely. Self-hosted tools are the best, thanks for doing that! I really really really suggest you make the landing page less annoying though. :P
I can understand the other javascript-ey bits as forgoing some amount of UX/usability in exchange for flashier visuals. But the loading indicator on initial page load just doesn't make sense to me.
Please don't recommend AGPL uncritically. Not everyone cares to think through the implications (yes, I have had that discussion with someone who told me was fine about me using his AGPL licensed program in a clearly non-AGPL compliant way because it was just GPL3 but for the web. I Had to find another solution.)
Scrolled to the bottom quickly, had to wait for it to animate in so I was staring at a blank page for a few seconds.
Can't be bothered to try the product, since I'll be old and gray by the time it boots.
Will definitely try this out. May sound strange to others but I could use a project management software, even though I'm a one man project operation...
Curious, what kind of database (if any) backend is it using? If it's not using MySQL or anything heavy like that, I'm sold!
Minimum Server Requirements
PHP 5.4 or greater
PDO PHP extendsion
MCrypt PHP extendsion
GD PHP library
MySql Database
If your webserver is running Apache then mod_rewrite should be installed
I use a very popular SaaS right now but would actually rather self-host (I like to own my data.)
Haven't had a chance to install it yet but from from the look of it and general feedback I could see my company making a switch if it all checks out.
I don't need responsiveness, HTML 5, a mobile app or any of that. Just gimme something that works!
* I'm not sure that 'self hosted' needs to be mentioned in the heading. You don't mention cloud or SaaS anywhere and have a big 'download' button so it should be obvious without stating it.
* "92five app covers all the basic project management features". Don't say your product is basic, the features should rock.
* Responsive. Yawn. Most managers don't know what this means. You don't mention 'mobile' anywhere in this section.
* Built with. This is the stuff you're interested in, and it's important but it has nothing to do with the product. Most users wouldn't care whether it's PHP, Java or Basic.
* Screenshots. Great we are past the techie bits and back to the actual product... But I don't know what I'm looking at.
* Wow, it's free! That's the best part and you mentioned it last... and in the FAQ. This should be up the top of the page!
I hope this helps.
It is not free - you can't make derivatives. It is just free of cost.
Its like a mix of a project manager and a timesheets portal. The front page contains your list of active tasks for the day, and any sticky tasks that you have. The team leader can assign tasks from projects to individual users, and be able to see the current project assigned time, and set threshold for hours spent / left.
Project managers will also be able to assign projects to teams, and also see current progress of tasks completed, time spent on tasks etc.
I was also thinking of distributing it as a self hosted open source app and maybe a hosted solution as well. For something like this, what would the recomended license be? Something like AGPL or BSD? How would any of you release the software, and if I would like to offer a hosted service in the future, would you worry of others using your software and selling the service as well?
I'm working on something myself and my contributions to open source has so far been in sending and getting accepted a few pull requests with improved docs on one project and improvements to some javascript library as well as sneding a few bucks to a couple of projects that takes donations.
Haven't release anything serious yet but I know if I do it will be permissive because at the moment I'm giving it away I want it to be as useful as possible and not tied up. (Unless I want to run some dual licensing scheme. ; )
First, creating a project doesn't work, after putting in the required info and clicking create I'm taken to an error page with no feedback as to what actually happened, even though the screen says 'something went wrong and we've noted that'. Also, requiring to add collaborators even if it's yourself is redundant, this shouldn't be required.
Tasks - The main tasks screen really isn't useful at all since each 'Task' takes up a huge amount of space, and all the links on the task card don't do anything, and even when sub-tasks are entered they don't show on the card. This section really seems like it should be tied into projects, not a standalone section, especially since there's a 'Todos' section as well.
In many places where input is required, it's not immediately apparent that the colored title area is editable or requires input.
There's quite a few little UI tweaks that need to be made, for instance the line height in the quick notes section on the dashboard does not match the notebook lines, so typing anything in there looks sloppy.
I'm currently working on a green field project with a very small team on my free time, so I installed 92five on my server and will be testing it "as if in production".
I will add any issues I encounter on their Github - https://github.com/chintanbanugaria/92five
I will take a look at this later though.
I have been liking scrumdo which also allows you to self-host the application (in addition to offering to host it for you - which is their profit model)
