Front-end

There’s not any ETA right now, lets see.

Ditto on front end.

Couldn’t you combine certain of the front-end from your WP User Frontend plugin to accomplish this? I like the way your WP User Frontend plugin has a dashboard and everything is done from the frontend.

I’m working with both plugins and considering diving into both to see how much I could do to accomplish this.. Not planning on accomplishing much more than understanding how you do it. I haven’t had much success joining functions from one plugin to another yet..

+1 for front end capability! This plug-in has captured what is so good about BaseCamp… Now please can we give it to the users as well as the admins? ??

If you could integrate it with BuddyPress too then that would be a game changer. Great looking plug in and very handy video too. Thanks.

Agreed – this is a premium plugin if it makes its way to the front end. Nicely done Tareq.

I posted on your blog it’s a really wonderful plug in. When you get the front end done and fully integrate it with Buddypress it will be a the best in class plug in a game changer. You could easily add premium features to it. I love it, but can’t use if for users until there is a front end. I use CollabPress now on my site but your project management plug in is so far advanced to their’s. Keep up the good work and I’m in for the premium version.

Well, there you have it Tareq. There is a huge void right now in the WordPress world, for an effective, reliable, well-integrated, complete and well supported solution for managing projects using wordpress. I have tried Propel, iProjectWeb, Ndizi Project Management, and others, for a non-profit website that is in dire need of such a solution. None of these plugins have worked well enough for us to happily adopt any of them. The two plugins that have come close are iProject Web and Ndizi, both of which have ultimately been failures in our regard, because the developers essentially abandoned the promising solutions midway through development. My non-profit is also at a point where we would just pay for a premium plugin that works. As you can see from the feedback here so far, there is a market for this. The demand may not be huge, but I believe such a plugin would be very highly appreciated by those who end up adopting it for their sites. So, please please, make it a priority to bring front-end functionality to this already wonderful plugin.

So… The perfect PM plug-in would be this GUI, made available to BuddyPress users on the front end? A bit like the best bits of WP Project Manager and CollabPress all rolled into one? Both open source projects?

Hmmm. Food for thought.

I have to disagree with anyone on this for this reason: this is an administrative tool, not a creative project.

I’m one of the developers of Propel and we used to have front end support and eventually deprecated it because we realized that all we were trying to do was create a new version of an administrative interface that WordPress already provides. Which is one of the most valuable features WordPress provides to plugin developers.

Compare WordPress to Drupal for example. Drupal has a phenomenal platform for plugin development. But the reason WordPress has conquered them in the CMS market is because WordPress understood that you can’t leave administrative UI up to the developers and designers. If you do, you open up an endless rabbit hole of bugs that are overlooked because the interface is changing all the time.

I’d also like to pose the question of: what’s the point?

Assuming that you have created a dedicated role for your Clients to sign in with so they only see WPPM. If you don’t have that then I do understand why one might feel a need for a front end UI.

Generally speaking, I have far more people I want to share the information with, than I need to share access with. Maybe just me, of course.

The biggest, and best Project Management tools – you know, the ones that cost thousands – are collaborative tools in the back end between staff/team members, but more importantly, and where they excel and why they get the big bucks, is because they are incredibly effective collaborative tools in the front end between manager and clients, who you don’t want in the back end but definitely have a need to know (it is after all, their project). And, that dog and pony show for the client, makes them robust marketing tools as well.

I almost completely agree with that statement. To clarify; I completely agree that there needs to be a “locked down” interface for clients. But I think the argument for utilizing a front end interface for this is simply because there is an assumption that it can’t be accomplished in the backend. Does that make sense?

Not at all, but I love to learn.

How do I expose all of the “management” that I’m doing in the back end, on my client’s project, to my client, who is not allowed access to the back end?

Haha, I appreciate your humbleness!

Well I think that you have to rephrase your question from “How do I keep my client out of the ‘back end'” to “How do I control what aspects of my website my client see’s”. Because displaying limited data on the front end is no different than displaying it on the back end except that it requires the plugin author to do even MORE work to add all this front end support.

What we do with our clients is we installed a respected plugin called Adminimize and Role Manager (I think that’s it I’ll have to check). Role Manager allows you to create new roles and choose what privileges they have (like the ability to add, create or view post types). Adminimize allows you to choose what things they can see like navigational items, panels, etc…

They’re extremely easy to install and configure. Literally could take you five minutes and BAM. You have a new role called “Client” that limits everything they can see.

Of course, I think this should probably be integrated into this plugin, or, better yet, WordPress Core, but for now this is what we do.

No, you miss the point.

I don’t want my clients, or potential clients, or vendors, or other 3rd parties, or any of the hundreds or thousands who might visit my site or that I might want to share the data display with, to have a membership or any access to the back end whatsoever. That would be entirely too cumbersome and wholly unnecessary.

And I don’t want to have to manipulate all of the other items inherent to the back end as that will complicate everything else I have to do.

And, I’m technically an idjit, so if it ain’t WYSIWYG, I’m lost.

I’d also like to have some control over how I display the data. Assuming the plugin uses shortcodes to handle its display, I can work with that or around that and apply CSS as needed. I can’t do that in the back end. And my clients are visually oriented. (that means I have to draw pretty pictures for them to understand anything).

I’m willing to use a membership plugin to control who sees what in the front end. I want the Project plugin to format and display it all first.

Different themes makes it more complex and will have quirks to bring it to frontend. Because maybe you will not have the enough content width to place the tabs and different themes will conflict with the CSS and will make it horrible. Although it needs to bring to frontend. Hmm…

As @s3w47m88 said, you can do all sort of things to minimize the admin panel to the client, but many of us (including me) doesn’t want everyone to enter to the admin panel. Thats why my plugin WP User Frontend was built.