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Project/Issue Tracking and Organization for the freelancer

I'm currently working on a pretty large, long-running project as the primary developer and systems administrator. I primarily work with one other person who acts as designer and the main interface with clients and others. Everyone works remote.

We quickly realized we needed some way to keep track of ongoing issues/ideas/features - and our initial response was a simple google sheet. I'm a big fan of starting with the simplest possible system first and adding complexity as needed. This worked pretty well, although prioritizing/sorting and remove completed "issues" became clunky over time.

In the past I've experienced quite a variety of systems for handling/tracking work. Jira is probably the most popular in larger organizations, but to my mind it was like using a sledgehammer when a pocket knife was needed... plus it was not free and we had no budget.

Trello and things like it are pretty nice, but I wanted something with a little more capability to track all the things releveant to a particular issue - i.e. documents and assets, steps to reproduce, connections with other issues, etc. Perhaps you can accomplish all that with Trello but I ended up going another route.

Currently, we've settled on Mantis - which is an open-source LAMP-based bug tracking system. It has worked pretty well. It has some odd ways it handles things like filters and sorting, but so far so good. It looks and works pretty old-school, but that's fine by me!
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