Introducing PHP Time Tracker

I am pleased to announce the beta release of PHP Time Tracker. A client-server application system for tracking the amount of time required to complete tasks and projects. I am hoping it will help potentially everybody involved in doing work discover how much time it actually takes to do certain tasks so that future estimates can be more accurate. I know that is a problem I currently have, being a relatively new software developer, and I would really like to start to build a baseline for estimating.

There are two main components to the system:

A web-based management interface:

• Allows for the creation of new user accounts, new projects and tasks for those projects
• Will allow for assigning tasks to different users
• Will allow for creating sub-tasks for any task
• Displays a complete log of all the time entries for any task along with user comments

A client-side Windows Forms application:

• Captures an XML feed of all tasks for a user from the web system
• Allows the desktop user to start and stop a timer that will automatically update the time logs on the server
• When a user stops a timer they will have the option to attach a comment to the log update that will be visible through the web interface

So yeah, that’s where I’m at today, the web system is online now at www.power-coder.net/timeTracker. The client application requires a couple of tweaks after some changes I made tonight, so it will be made available for download tomorrow.

Please remember, this is a beta release, it is not by any means ready for production use. I do encourage you to post any feedback you have.

Known Issues:

• Styles don’t work properly in IE (not 100% in firefox either, but much better)
• On pages where there is currently no info in the DB you’ll see a lot of [–someThing–] tags. This is because not all of the queries have been written yet and I have not yet taken an empty result set into account. This will be repaired this week.
• There is absolutely no validation on any of the input. I know, this is bad, no excuse, but it will be repaired this week. Please don’t SQL Inject my database, that wouldn’t be nice!

Please browse through the site, tell me what you like, tell me what you don’t like and what can be improved. That’s the whole purpose for this beta release.

Over the next while there are going to be lots of changes going on to the whole system, I have a huge list of features that I would like to add in, which I will attempt to post as soon as possible. So please don’t be alarmed if things aren’t the way you left them when you sign in after a couple of days.

Thanks for testing it out!