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Redmine: Changing Versions to Milestones

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At the office, we’ve started to get serious about organizing what we’re doing. I mean, it was getting to the point where every time I received a phone call, it began with “I know you’re really busy, but…” My boss was taking tasks away from me left and right – not in a bad way, but just so I could get the important things done. I’m pretty sure threats were made to several folks to not bother me.

One day, I sat down with him at lunch, and we decided we really needed a way to just figure out “what stuff we had to do”. A project management system was needed, both to solve the problem of tasking the department equally and so we could track what jobs were in progress.

After several involved Google searches, I came across Redmine, a very flexible, web-based project management system developed on Ruby on Rails. I was skeptical at first, but truthfully Redmine is one of the most active and functional project management apps I’ve used. Primarily aimed at software development, Redmine has many third-party plugins available to extend the capabilities for any organization, and can be used to control nearly any type of project. Plus, the "free" price point was a lot more attractive than Microsoft Office Project Server.

One of the major modifications we were interested in making was changing the “versions” feature to “milestones”. Our primary use of Redmine is managing standard projects, not software development, but the concept is the same. I found that I was not the only one interested in this feature, a request had been submitted nearly 2 years ago. The basic consensus was that it could be changed, but then it would not suit the needs of software developers. As a flexible framework, it was noted that you could edit the *.yml configuration files with little difficulty, but no further explanation was provided.

Well, here’s that explanation on how to change “versions” to “milestones” in Redmine:

1

Navigate to your Redmine install directory, and open config\locales\en.yml (or whichever localization you need to modify). These files contain labels for each language supported by Redmine.

2

Run a simple find and replace for the word version. Be very careful not to modify the actual variables, just the assigned value.

3

Save the file, and restart the Redmine application.
That’s all there is to it!

You might see the capability to change some of these values from the Redmine GUI in the distant future, but at the current time it’s a slight technical challenge. In any case, I’ve found this is a very quick and simple fix. I hope this is a help to anyone (like I was) who’s starting out with Ruby on Rails for the first time and is a little apprehensive.
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