Professional Plugins for Redmine to Promote Your Project Management

Redmine is an open-source alternative to Jira, Trello, and other project management tools. It was initially developed for tracking technical issues. But now, it is multifunctional and can be used for time and bug-tracking, managing tasks, and reviewing a project’s overall progress. It is highly valued by project managers and team leaders. The program offers great functionality, superior process transparency, and good software security overall. 

However, some professionals may find that Redmine lacks some useful features and complementary tools support. The universal solution for this issue — installing plugins that can adjust your Redmine edition’s capabilities. Let’s get to know more about the most popular extensions for Redmine and what they can offer.

But before going any further, there are reliable companies that provide Redmine plugin development assistance. Should you need a custom plugin, contact Twinslash, and we will do the rest.

Best Plugins That Will Empower Your Redmine Application

Business environments tend to transform rapidly over time. So, even if you already have Redmine employed for a long time, one day, you may feel that it does not perform as well as expected.

Redmine has its code open for modifications. So, third-party providers can create digital solutions to cover your varying needs. Here in Twinslash, we offer both custom development and plugin installation services for your business.

See some of the public plugins’ descriptions below to learn more about their usefulness:

CRM Plugin

This digital solution helps you streamline your workflow and simplify communication with customers. You will get complete information about each of your business contacts. It may include background info, orders that were made, their issues requests, their projects, and many more. You can also email your clients conveniently and set follow-up reminders.

As a bonus, the CRM plugin adds a batch of complementary features to your Redmine edition. It includes sales funnels overview and chart and reports functionality.

Feedback and Bug Tracking Plugin

This one is essential for testing and technical support of your projects. It allows issue tracking to your customers, colleagues, and other Redmine users involved in a project. The plugin employs a simple point-and-click reporting method to send screenshots and bug reports.

This way, technicians and developers receive useful feedback. It helps in rapid bug fixing and preparing future project updates.

Resources Plugin

This plugin is especially useful for heads of departments, team leads, and project managers. It allows the scheduling of working hours of employees. Moreover, it enables allocating labor resources needed for particular tasks and prioritizing projects.

A resource chart is an in-built feature that helps determine which employees are overloaded and who still have free work hours. It is needed to receive a general picture of projects and filter/view configuration options for a convenient search. It also has the conventional time tracker that every employee may use.

What’s even more interesting about the Resources plugin is that it allows booking labor resources in advance. It can be performed directly on charts by using the pop-up window. Thus, the workload can be planned more precisely. Weekly and monthly diagrams and interactive chart editing are included by default.

Agile Plugin

If you work in an agile manner, you may find this plugin especially useful. This digital solution already has SCRUM and Kanban methodologies integrated. Besides, it offers visualization of a project’s metrics using 11 Agile diagrams, such as Lead Time, Velocity, Burndown, and others. You can monitor projects, visualize their outcomes, estimate the possibility of achieving goals within a sprint, and many more.

The Agile plugin is open source and fully customizable software. It offers superior flexibility and capabilities to adjust Redmine’s functionality to your needs.

Usability Plugin

The Redmine software is feature-rich, which definitely adds to its usefulness but it also makes the user interface less intuitive. The simple solution to the problem is the Usability plugin. It allows you to modify and adjust the Redmine’s control panel to your needs. For example, you can hide unnecessary interface elements or, on the contrary, add the most frequently used ones. It may streamline the performing of the routine operations.

Monitoring and Controlling Plugin

With this solution, you have the opportunity to review the state of current tasks in a visual form. The Monitoring and Controlling plugin allow quick and convenient access to a chart functionality. You can filter projects and issues by their status and see how well your team performs at a given moment. The plugin is lightweight, easy to work with, and ideally suits project managers, team leaders, and heads of departments.

Checklists Plugin

It’s another simple plugin that aims at simplifying project management by using checklists. This add-on offers checklists templates available in 14 languages or allows to create a custom one. You can make one-click edits effortlessly and track all the changes in the history log.

What’s also great about the plugin is that you can interact with its checklists directly on the Agile board.

Questions Plugin

This add-on complements your Redmine edition with absolutely new functionality. The Questions plugin allows you to create FAQ and Q&A knowledge bases. Besides, it also supports the building of idea reporting pages.

There are secondary in-built features for your convenience. For example, you can make some questions or answers appear at the top of the list or assign special tags to topics. Aside from this, users can vote for answers so that the best-rated ones get to the top. With this plugin, you can also easily moderate your content: select and feature the best answers on every topic, protect some answers from edits, and even close the comment section if needed.

The plugin is a great fit for any team that has complex topics to discuss, ideas to propose and improve, and some support to offer to new members.

Reporter Plugin

This plugin is especially useful for dealing with Redmine issues. It allows preparing custom PDF reports in just a few clicks. Such documents contain extensive information about issues' statuses and updates. You can use templates or create your own branding layout with custom fields, such as time entries and notes, and a unique design. 

You can even automate report preparation. Once set, the plugin will generate reports on the chosen basis. In addition, with the Reporter plugin, you can provide public access to your reports via links or just by sending emails.

Benefits of Using Redmine for Your Project

Let’s review the main benefits of using the Redmine project management tool:

• Open-Source Nature

Software that has an open codebase allows users great modification options. They also ensure process transparency and faster development. The large IT community enjoys enhanced stability and superior customization of their open-source project management tools like Redmine.

• Built-in Time Tracking

Redmine enables users to track working time spent on different tasks like other solid competitors. Time logging can be set to start and stop automatically, and there are multiple alternative ways to use trackers. In such a manner, you can easily manage your time in any working window and have an accurate overview of the hours spent and progress achieved.

• Forum Feature

What’s also good about open-source software is a strong community. Topic-related forums are all about finding answers to your questions and solutions to your issues in no time. If you are struggling with any aspect of Redmine functionality, there’s an entire forum. It contains ready-to-use solutions and its members are willing to answer your questions.

• Integrated Wiki

Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia that contains mostly relevant information on nearly any topic. It is free and publicly available to anyone. By having well-organized info on your project on Wiki, you save your time on answering multiple questions from customers. It also enhances your company’s reputation. With Redmine, you have the built-in functionality for creating and integrating pages on Wikipedia.

Why Choose Redmine and Upgrade It with Plugins?

The Redmine project management tool is a flexible environment with vast functionality. It is already good enough for most teams and types of projects but still has much to be desired. But its user interface may seem overwhelming and somewhat rigid.

Polishing Redmine to perfection can be done with the help of plugins. Developers can introduce multiple add-ons due to the program’s open-source nature. It will help you achieve maximal productivity and the best user experience. This way, every employee and manager can enjoy the enhanced workflow.

For these plugins to work smoothly, they must be integrated by a professional dev agency. Twinslash is a reliable team of developers specializing in integrating existing plugins into your Redmine environment. In case none of the available plugins suit your needs, contact us, so we can develop your ideal, custom add-on.