After a few days of playing and working with Redmine and some plugins, here’s where I’ve ended up:

• Redmine 0.8.7 (latest stable branch)
• Mercurial repository
• redmine charts plugin (http://github.com/mszczytowski/redmine_charts)
• redmine backlog plugin (http://github.com/relaxdiego/backlogs)

I tried the redmine scrumdashboard plugin (http://github.com/thus/redmine-scrumdashboard-plugin), but was never able to get it even functional. The whole thing stacktraced under 0.8.7 and I’m just too ill informed on rails to be able to effectively debug it. I did log it as an issue (http://github.com/thus/redmine-scrumdashboard-plugin/issues#issue/6) though.

While I was working with the backlog plugins, I found a few quirks. In one case, it wasn’t editing anything from the backlog tab in Redmine. That turned out to be an issue with a recent Redmine feature related to cross site forgery protection. There were a couple of posts in the plugin forum and some associated bugs at the bug tracker. On the forums,  Eric Doughty-Papassideris suggested a solution, so I forked up the github project and posted that fix for anyone to use. Even made a pull request back to the master project – don’t know if it’s 100% the right thing to do for the solution, but it does do the trick.

The backlog plugin, while working, did have a quirk that I never quite identified. I enabled the plugin and slapped in a bunch of issues, and one of them caused the plugin to render in a really odd way. I suspect it wasn’t defending well against stupid parameters, but I wasn’t ever able to figure out why the thing was rendering all whacked. I ended up deleting that example project, but on another it appeared to work correctly.

Of the two, the scrumdashboard plugin appears to be in a “quiet phase” – little commit activity and I suspect it’s running afoul of recent Redmine updates and features. Backlog seems to be keeping up better, so I expect that’s where we’ll focus our usage.

Update:

One thing that I found surprising – If you’re using Redmine with Mercurial, the redmine instance wants to have a mercurial repository *local* on that machine – you can’t point it at a remote mercurial repository and have it function correctly. It only wants to read off the local filesystem to do it’s work. That surprised me – as I was planning on having a separate machine for the repository originally to separate the concerns.