Introducing a Free, Simple Project Management Plugin for WordPress

Finding a good project management solution is damn near as hard as finding the love of your life. If you’re already in love with WordPress, or BuddyPress and you’ve been dreaming of managing your projects from your WordPress or BuddyPress dashboard, I’ve got just the thing for you.

I’ve tested most of the project management plugins on the market, and a lot of them are very disappointing and complicated to use. But my painstaking ordeal of trial and error has not been in vain. I’ve managed to find two project management solutions which are actually pretty easy to use and have all the basic features required managing a successful project.

One of them is for BuddyPress, the other for WordPress. Since I’m partial to BuddyPress, let’s start with the WordPress solution. I’ll be showing you the BuddyPress solution next…gotta save the best for last!

For WordPress: Introducing WP Project Management Ultimate

This is a super simple, user friendly project management plugin for WordPress (oh, it’s also free…woohoo!) With WP Project Management Ultimate, a new project is created in the same way as a new WordPress post.

The right hand sidebar then contains some modifications for inputting additional project details and inviting team members to collaborate on your project. Check it out in action…

The WP Project Management Ultimate then gives you the simple option to create project types, which you can organize under subtypes (parent types). This helps you keep your projects organized according to company, project type or client:

Once you’ve got your projects organized into types, the WP Project Management Ultimate dashboard allows you to sort and to search your projects by type, date range, deadline or payment status.

Other cool features of WP Project Management Ultimate

• Notification emails sent to members of project team when project is updated or comment is left by another team member.
• Ability to track project status according to percentage completed
• Custom CSS option for customized project pages

Things I Think Would Improve WP Project Management Ultimate

• Paypal invoicing feature
• Ability to create milestones for each project
• Ability to create and manage perpetual projects
• Capability to track project budget and payments sent or owed to team members
• Ability to pay team members via Paypal mass pay (PLEASE!)

Overall, I think this is one of the best WordPress Project management solutions for the WordPress user who is on a budget and who doesn’t care to spend a lot of time learning how to use complex features.

For BuddyPress: Introducing BP GTM System

The “GMT” in BP GTM System stands for “Group Task Management,” and that’s exactly what this cool (FREE) BuddyPress plugin does. You simply create a project team by creating a BuddyPress group, then you can assign projects to group members according to predefined roles.

Check it out…

I prefer this to the WP Project Management Ultimate because you can better organize who is responsible for what tasks. You can also make yourself the project owner and delegate the management to your project manager (less work, that’s always a good thing right?).

The other thing I love about the BP GTM System is you can break your project apart according to tasks, assigning a deadline to each task AND filtering your display either according to project deadlines…

… or by task deadlines:

Other cool features of BP GTM System

• Notification emails sent to members of project team when project is updated or comment is left by another team member.
• Ability to filter and view discussions either by tasks or by projects
• Ability to set up personal tasks which are not visible by other team members
• Ability to create categories for organizing your projects.

Things I Think Would Improve BP GTM System

• Paypal invoicing feature
• Capability to track project budget and payments sent or owed to team members
• Ability to pay team members via Paypal mass pay (PLEASE!)

Okay, so if I could wave my magic wand and add a few features to each of these project management plugins, I certainly would. But considering that they’re both easy to use, free and that they get the job done right from your WordPress or BuddyPress site, you won’t hear me complaining.

You can download both of these from your WordPress dashboard, or check them both out here:

WP Project Management Ultimate

BP GTM System

Enjoy!

-Seth C