On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a post from Keith Casey about an open source project he's worked on for the past three years has made it to get where it is. This also includes some of the challenges they faced and how they've made sure the code's gotten better over time.

When most people think of Open Source PHP projects, some immediately spring to mind. If you're a developer or a blogger, there are obvious choices, but what about options for small to medium businesses? What Open Source projects are out there to help with day to day operations and track how projects are going?

The project, web2project, started as a fork of another project but has taken on a life of its own. They looked at what the users wanted and added iCal feeds and the idea of "hooks" developers could use to attach their own components into the project's structure. They also added loads of unit tests to ensure that things were kept stable as well as some more advanced time handling via the DateTime object PHP has to offer. If you'd like to see the current state of the project, you can find it over on SourceForge.

In this recent post to his blog Keith Casey looks at applying the Joel Test to an open source project he contributes largely to, web2project.

In the last few months or so, it appears the PHP Community has finally found the Joel Test. Lorna Jane spoke about it last month at PHPNW 09 and this week Brandon Savage adapted it for web development. While I'd love to point out the fact that I've been writing about the Joel Test for years and even have the "Joel On Software" book on the required reading list for Blue Parabola staff... but I digress...

Keith looks at the different parts of the test - from making shippable software to good unit tests to creating a good build process - and compares them to the current state of web2project. He mainly focuses on the question of "Can you make a shippable version of your software in one step?"

On the Zend Developer Zone today the latest episode of the PHP Abstract podcast has been released - Keith Casey talking about his Web2Project applications.

In this episode I interview Keith Casey while we were both at php|tek in Chicago. Keith Casey is a lead developer on the open source software: Web2Project, which was being released the day that this interview was recorded.

As always, there's three ways you can grab this latest show:

• get the mp3 directly
• listen using the in-page player
• or subscribe to the RSS feed to get this and other past/future shows

Keith Casey has announced the first (ever) Release Candidate of the web2Project project management system that follows "the concept of a Rich Internet Application (RIA) we will be providing an interactive and effective way of managing projects."

I could talk about commits, issue counts, etc, but that's actually the least important part...As of early morning EST on 13 April 2009, the web2project Release Candidate is live: web2project-v1.0-rc1.tar.gz

His post details some of the recent improvements to the software - fixes to Department filters, a major update to Cascading Tasks and a call for testing from the development community.

You can try out a demo of the tool here and learn more about it in this webcast.