Topic: Basecamp API / "You are being redirected" Repsonse to delete message call

Dan, glad it helped. And thanks for posting your code.

Topic: Basecamp API / "You are being redirected" Repsonse to delete message call

Dan, this is just a guess, and I’ve not looked at the PHP wrapper you mention so I may be off-track. When you try to delete your message there is no body to the request so it’s defaulting to a GET. You need to force it to be a POST.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Printer stylesheet broken -- formatting lost

Sarah, as noted in several threads the printing issue with bullets and caps has not been fixed. Please could you let us know if there is a plan to address this.

Topic: Miscellaneous / Notifications to two email addresses

I looked to see if you could set up a free email account (gmail etc.) for him that could forward to two other accounts, but none that I saw allow mail to be forwarded to more than one account.

If gmail did allow forwarding to multiple accounts you could use it as a listserver, which I guess is one of the reasons they don’t allow it. But yes, I think it’s quite reasonable to expect clients to organize their own email distribution.

Topic: Feature Requests / Due dates for To-Dos

Don’t worry, I didn’t think that at all. I was just wondering if you’ve had some experience that has put you off the idea of a more complete management system. I’m no evangelist for Gantt (it’s just a graph after all) or for any particular method (critical path, critical chain… etc.) The trick is to put in place a Basecamp-sympathetic mechanism that works as a full-featured task management system for those that choose it but also scales easily for projects from simple to complex.

Topic: Feature Requests / Due dates for To-Dos

mckinneylaw – thanks, but have you changed your mind? :-)

+1. The lack of any true task management system in Basecamp is a glaring defect.

The word “Gantt” just gets caught in the back of my throat and hangs there.

I know, many people have this reaction – but just like any graph, it depends both on how it’s presented and interpreted. I just think of everything behind “today” as a measurement and everything in front of “today” as an estimate. There may be no estimates, then the chart just ends with “today” and everything is measurement. It’s also a compact way of packaging up a whole lot of information and providing a visually intuitive way of navigating through a project. (It’s quite a good bit of design actually – not as good as Minard’s map of Napoleon’s march into Russia, but good for a general purpose.)

rwsllc – the way I see this working is that it shouldn’t get in the way. Just by entering a To-Do item in a list you’ll automatically get a separate message thread associated with every item. If you then choose to add only a due-date, the chart will show just the date the item was added, it’s due-date and actual completion date. Even if you choose not to specify any dates at all other than entering the task and checking it off when it’s done, just spanning those dates on a calendar along with other tasks is uncannily provocative. If instead of due-dates you want to provide specific task dependencies and time estimates, then a whole different analysis kicks in involving resources and critical chains… however complicated you need to be, the representation is as simple as possible.

Topic: Feature Requests / Due dates for To-Dos

Still can only say release in “the summer” :-) though things are evolving with each iteration. We’re planning on replacing the table described above in this thread with a simple Gantt chart fragment – this captures the essential information, is visually more intuitive and much more compact.

Each task has its own message showing a fragment of the total chart, just the previous, current, and following tasks (links and pop-ups not shown here). The announcements section of each project will have a complete chart showing tasks from all to-do lists, and a special Summary Project will have a mega-chart summarizing relationships and resources across all projects.

We have in mind turning Basecamp’s native To-Do lists and Messages into a complete task and resource management system.

Topic: Basecamp API / Headers for Basecamp Email >> Messages

Jeff – the numbers in the reply-to address aren’t random codes, they are specifically the user_id to attribute the comment to, and the post_id of the parent message. e.g. U123456P7654321-reply@yourdomain.projectpath.com. If you received the email notification with this reply-to address then 123456 is your user_id, and 7654321 is the post_id.

Does this help?

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Print style looses data

Can anyone else confirm the disappearing words when printing?

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Print style looses data

I know some recent problems with the print styles have been fixed, but it seems some other things have been inadvertently broken in the process. (Maybe this never worked in the first place though, I don’t know).

Message as displayed on screen -

Same message as seen in print -

Actual content of the message -

* This is IMPORTANT!

Resulting content in both screen and print style HTML -

<div class="formatted_text_body">
    <ul>
        <li>This is <span class="caps">IMPORTANT</span>!</li>
    </ul>
</div>

It seems to be the combination of a textile bullet and CAPS that causes the problem. I’ve just seen this throughout my projects where an upper-case acronym is used anywhere in a bulleted list. The sentence no longer makes sense in print because the object of the sentence is lost.

Topic: Miscellaneous / Permissions-One Company all Clients?

Gayle, I’d go with the one client company – say CLIENTS. On each project you’ll then get a header consisting of the project title followed by CLIENTS. If instead you’d like it to be project title followed by YOUR COMPANY, you need to reassign each project to your company on the settings page as it’s assigned to the client company by default.

Topic: Feature Requests / Move items between projects

One thing embedded in the way Basecamp works is that projects have different visibilities. How would you want moving an item to behave? If you move a message say, from a project with 10 members (4 from your company and 6 from various clients), to a project with 3 members (2 of them not in the first 10), presumably 9 people should be added to the new project along with the move. If not then who should the post and comments be attributed to? How about To-Do’s? Should just the people with assigned items and logged time be added, or everyone if it’s assigned to “Anyone”? I’m not sure everyone will have the same expectations.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Missing Messages in Categories

Another issue with the Category view is that the list of files shown under “All files in…” does not include files that have been attached to comments in that category.

Topic: Feature Requests / Due dates for To-Dos

All relevant data calculated for time-logging, scheduling, etc. will be pushed back into your BC account so you can access it there using your own API programs. We won’t neglect the reporting side of things either and the reports will be conveniently machine readable, something along the lines described here. If you would like to discuss user requirements or provide “use cases” to influence development please drop me an email (address in a previous post in this thread.)

Topic: Feature Requests / Due dates for To-Dos

You won’t have to download any data or do anything extra outside of your BC account. The software runs in the cloud and interacts directly with your account. We’ll be able to ramp up capacity as required.

Topic: Feature Requests / Ability to Link Messages and To Dos

Earle, sorry if I’m not answering the right question here. It’s easiest to get the item_id using the API, then yes, paste the whole phrase "Item name":/I{item_id} into a message and replace the {item_id} part with the numeric code. (More help on textile here if you want it.)

Topic: Feature Requests / Due dates for To-Dos

Simon, we’ve not made a decision on pricing yet, but think it will be around 15-20% of the Basecamp subscription rate. How will it work? You won’t see any additional software or web-application that you have to run or use – you’ll just use Basecamp. No demo or trial available yet, we’re planning on release in the summer.

Topic: Feature Requests / Ability to Link Messages and To Dos

Simon, in a message you can construct a link using textile, like this:

This works OK if you want links in a few specific cases, but if you want this generally across all To-Do lists it’s not feasible to do manually.

We’re planning to release a subscription service along these lines (see a previous post in a thread about due dates here). Perhaps you’d like to comment?

Topic: Feature Requests / Ability to Link Messages and To Dos

Stephen, point your return link at /I{item_id}
This redirects to /projects/{project_id}/todos/list/{list_id}#{item_id}

Topic: Feature Requests / Due dates for To-Dos

Here’s something we have in the pipeline – a task manager with the following features integrated directly in Basecamp with no additional administrative overhead:

• due dates
• priorities
• dependencies
• estimated durations
• automatic scheduling
• resource optimization
• time logging

Adding a new To-Do item will automatically generate a corresponding message with reciprocal links as illustrated in the screen-shot. You set task attributes and log time by posting comments. Scheduling and resource allocation are handled automatically and the main body of the message is updated whenever attributes or dependencies change. Each To-Do list has a corresponding message category, and every Item has a corresponding message.

The example below shows a task that has just started, triggered by the completion of a prior dependency. 1.5 hours of an estimated 6 hours have been logged and the completion date has been estimated based on other commitments and task priorities.

We’re planning this as a third-party subscription service to be released in the summer.

If you’re interested and would like to make suggestions please post here or drop me a line at neil.caithness@2myproject.com

Topic: Basecamp API / Todo lists for archived projects

Peter, the API works just fine retrieving info from archived projects.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Emailed Comment replies to [do-not-reply@account.domain.com]

With the REPLY-TO address set by Basecamp there no longer seems to be any good reason to have the “do-not-reply@” as the FROM address. This could just be set to the sender’s real address.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / EMailed message comments attributed to wrong person

As I understand it posting a comment by email is not authenticated an any way (e.g. by the sender’s FROM address) other than by the REPLY-TO address set by Basecamp. The address looks something like this:

If you received the message directly from Basecamp at your registered email address then the U123456 part is your user_id and your reply should be attributed to you. However, a message from anyone to a Basecamp address will be attributed to the person identified in the TO address. Perhaps you received this message by a more circuitous route – maybe a forward from your client. Try to figure out how it is you got to be replying to the message originally sent to your client with their id in the REPLY-TO address.

Topic: Feature Requests / to-dos: multiple responsible persons

Seems to me that this is an issue of granularity. I would say your “task” is a better fit to an entire todo list. Your developer, db admin and sys admin can then add individual tasks. When everyone has signed off their tasks, the whole thing is done.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / External Login

Dan

In your code just change name="username" to name="user_name"

PS. That photograph on your Work tab is one badly set sail :-)

Neil