I'm working on a Project Management/tracking site for work.  it's driving me up the wall.  I've been going around and around trying to get the usability of the dashboard views right using contrib modules, and every time I try another path I end up on a dead end. It's INCREDIBLY frustrating.

I started with Storm -- which is on the way to being somethign that will be really great, but I don't have the time to wait for it to be completed -- so I'm going to have to roll my own recipie.  And, so, the adventure begins.

The content types themselves are easy.  The node type around which the other content types orbit is the Project, which started out it's life as an organic group, but I've since ditched OG as having too much I do'nt need.  But, I'm working to try to create some of the same strucutres. 

The Project type itself is pretty simple -- not a lot going on there, it's just a page that other node types will be connecting to.  I don't want to have a lot of information on the project itself, because I'm going to want to do so much with views and content creation forms on those pages it doesn't make sense to have a lot of the information about projects that you don't really need on a day-to-day basis.  All of that information is important when a project is being evaulated and prioritized, but it isn't important when you're working on it.  So, there's a separate content type called the Project Charter that contains all that sort of background information.

Projects also have a shared notes space -- a Wiki content type.

Tasks are pieces of projects -- discrete things that need to be done.  I'm not exactly sure how granular these will get, but I don't think that matters in the short term. Tasks have estimated time, but not actual time records associated with them.

TimeTickets are notations of time spent on a task.  Since time may be spent on a task by multiple people, there won't be a 1-to-1 relationship from Tasks to TimeTickets. 

And, to round everything out, we're going to need a Customer content type so work that can be billed to someone can be billed to the correct customers.

All of that is remarkably easy -- there are a few places where I would like to figure out some efficiencies and ways to make the content types easy to create, but the basics are there.

Where I run into challenges are in the views that I'm going to be using to create the tools employees and project managers will use to track what folks are doing on the site. More on that in another post.