

Show HN: Self-hosted project management application - chintanb
http://92fiveapp.com

======
aw3c2
Free 5 minute grumpy feedback on the landing page :)

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](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."!

\-----

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

~~~
Smudge
Yeah I found that loading indicator bizarre. What am I waiting for? Is it
circumventing the browser's rendering engine and doing it all in canvas or
something? (I mean, I know it's not, that would be silly. It's more likely
having to make multiple network requests to fetch the rest of the content.)

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.

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notduncansmith
Took 15 seconds to load the _landing page_. Honestly, you lost me as a user
after the first 5 but I wanted to see the rest of the page.

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.

~~~
jiggy2011
It's probably loading slowly because being linked on HN is giving the server
too much traffic. It's self hosted anyway, so that doesn't really matter.

~~~
notduncansmith
It does really matter - the landing page loads 1.9MB of content. This is
easily 10x the size one should expect from a landing page. It's reasonable to
assume that the app itself would follow similar proportions, and that means
(most likely) load times upwards of 45 seconds. No thanks.

~~~
jiggy2011
45 seconds? That sounds like a huge overestimate, especially after you've
cached the assets. A reasonable internet connection should shift 1.9MB in 2-3
seconds.

~~~
ishansharma
Depends which country's reasonable you are talking about. In my country,
broadband is anything more than 256 kbps! So, to call their services
broadband, almost all providers drop speed after FUP limit (anywhere from
8-200 GB) to 256kbps.

And average speed is something like 2-3 Mbps.

~~~
staunch
Shitty internet is your problem. Fix it so you can experience the internet
properly in 2014.

~~~
DanBC
Or devs could stop including fucking huge but pointless assests in what should
be a simple web page.

"Test on real hardware" includes testing on the reduced bandwidth that most
people have.

~~~
staunch
Don't forget to make sure it works on IE6 and on an ISDN too.

The only problem here is shitty internet in 2014. No civilized country has any
excuse. Running fiber is incredibly inexpensive relative to almost all major
infrastructure costs. A 2MB web page is not the problem.

~~~
srgpqt
Don't forget to make sure it only works on 48 core supercomputers equipped
with 8 TB of RAM.

The only problem here (and everywhere) is shitty developers thinking that
being in 2014 is an acceptable excuse for extremely shoddy work. No self-
respecting developer has any excuse. At the global scales, it must be costing
trillions of dollars in wasted electricity. All 2MB web pages in the world
only compound the problem when they should be < 100kb.

As with everything, there should be balance. This certainly isn't it.

~~~
staunch
Damn shitty developers like John Carmack wasting computing power on better
graphics! Where's my pong!?

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tjsix
I think this app has potential but after installing a local copy and playing
with it for a few minutes there are a few things right off the bat that are a
bit of an issue:

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.

------
guidedlight
Okay, I was just reading through the landing page. Here are my thoughts:

* 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.

~~~
liotier
> Wow, it's free

It is not free - you can't make derivatives. It is just free of cost.

------
BorisMelnik
I'm really impressed from what I see. Would love an excuse to not spend
$200/month on project management software :)

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!

~~~
claar
What SaaS do you currently use for project management?

~~~
BorisMelnik
I didn't want to say here, but Basecamp. And I have absolutely nothing against
them but I wouldn't mind saving a grand or two every year if this can do the
same thing and hold up to a dozen or so users.

~~~
ishansharma
I'd love that as well. But the killer feature that Basecamp has for me is that
you can reply to their emails. Half of my clients have created initial
accounts and haven't logged back after that. Yet, they can communicate. If
this can do that, I'm switching now!

~~~
BorisMelnik
You see I didn't even know about that feature, definitely something I 'd like
to look into using.

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johnward
Is "self hosted" considered a positive or negative these days? It seems like
there is a small niche that still wants control over their data but everyone
else seems ok with the cloud.

~~~
daigoba66
I consider it a plus.

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.

~~~
johnward
Also as for the business model you've mentioned. I've seen this done in
competitive spaces like affiliate marketing. If you don't know most affiliates
are super paranoid about thier data as leaking info about a campaign can lead
to tons of copies and there goes your revenue. They seem to mostly prefer self
hosted apps. Imobitrax offers a self hosted paid tracking system with a
monthly fee. A lot of people used to use the free prosper202 self hosted
tracking system too. Now recently I'm seeing a shift where people are not
afraid to use cloud systems like voluum. I'm not sure what is causing the
acceptance to change. It could just be that everything is cloud hosted now so
people are getting used to the idea.

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?

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M4v3R
I would really love to see some good self-hosted Basecamp killer. This is
getting close, but lacks Basecamp's most important feature (at least for me):
discussions. This is something that we are using A LOT, and no other software
even comes close to what Basecamp has to offer in that area.

------
cellover
I have setup a demo env for those interested:

[http://92fivedemo.pilgrimbreak.com/](http://92fivedemo.pilgrimbreak.com/)

Email: demoguest@92fivedemo.com

Password: 12346#0azeRtu

I'll keep it up for 1 or 2 days.

~~~
k3oni
I can't seem to be able to access your demo: "This webpage is not available" .

~~~
cellover
I had no problem connecting. Did you disable javascript?

~~~
stevoo
i cant access it as well ... but i believe its that my work is blocking
certain ports. That could be a reason ...

The server at 92fivedemo.pilgrimbreak.com can't be found because the DNS look-
up failed. DNS is the network service that translates a website's name to its
Internet address. This error is most often caused by having no connection to
the Internet or a misconfigured network. It can also be caused by an
unresponsive DNS server or a firewall preventing Google Chrome from accessing
the network.

~~~
cellover
It seems the DNS slave was not up to date so you have 50% chance of having no
DNS resolution. It appears to be resolved now as I can curl the page from my
home server.

------
calgoo
Im currently working on something similar, but focused on the tasks more.

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?

~~~
reitanqild
AGPL feels toxic to me. At least add a commercial option then.

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. ; )

------
chintanb
Guys, 92fiveapp is on github Visit
[https://github.com/chintanbanugaria/92five](https://github.com/chintanbanugaria/92five)

------
cellover
Interesting project!

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](https://github.com/chintanbanugaria/92five)

------
newman8r
Seems like it's getting overloaded right now as I just get a loading animation
for 20+ seconds.

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)

------
qmaxquique
I just created a demo installation of 92fiveapp at Terminal.com. You just need
to spin up a new container using this snapshot:
[https://terminal.com/tiny/yTUnxPVAiz](https://terminal.com/tiny/yTUnxPVAiz)

~~~
iamshs
That was helpful. Even though the site required login, but well appreciated.

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Deusdies
This looks exactly like something I've been looking for!

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!

~~~
chintanb
Let me know what kind of database you want to use ? I might be able to help
you out.

~~~
Deusdies
sqlite would be great, or some NoSQL solution such as Mongo (though I see as
that being less likely).

~~~
stephenr
How is mongodb "light" compared to mysql/percona/compatible ?

~~~
Deusdies
It's not. I just have an instance of MongoDB running on a separate server.

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jotm
Looks great, has potential: nice design, self hosted, responsive UI, open
source. Maybe create a companion offline app for smartphones/tablets that
would sync with the server?

------
cpfohl
I'd love to see a live demo of this...

~~~
chintanb
let me know your email and would set up a demo account for you to test.

~~~
ProAm
Where can I email you at? I'd love to demo this as well.

------
simonswords82
The app looks great, but how are you going to make money from this so you can
sustain it?

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ProAm
This looks great.

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skimmas
Whoooa and it even runs on a macbook. sorry but I can't help but feeling
screenshots inside "macs" look cheesy.

