After bouncing PHPGroupware, I took a look at eGroupware, which is a fairly recent (six months or so) fork of PHPGoupware.
The story from the PHPGoupWare forum is that a group of developers who had been having a little trouble following the rules (PHPGroupWare is a GNU project, so it’s Stallman’s way or the highway), and having their commits rolled back as a result, decided it was highway time.
And are doing a fine job. They’re on release candidate 2, and it’s an honest label. Much better docs (not perfect but better), the install program actually guesses appropriate paths and fills in the boxes (PHPGW said it did, but they were blank when I installed) and –showstarter– the admin program actually works. When I enabled the todo list it actually showed up in my menu.
Against that, eGW doesn’t have as many apps. In particular it just has a todo list, not a full scale project planner. However, I actually only wanted a todo list not a project planner. All the other apps we’ll actually use seem to be identical. The eGW folks seem to have put their efforts into getting the framework working, and they seem to have succeed. This is a perfectly fine version 1.0.
Quick note on 11/10: When you put information into eGroupWare, it’s not enough to mark the information public. You also have to go into preferences for the specifice application and share it either by group or by individual user. It took me a few minutes to discover this after Lisa put her address book in and I couldn’t read it.