Replacing Project and Project issue in Drupal 6

Drupal 6 has a problem, Project and Project Issue are not yet ready for it, and they may never be (incidentally this is the reason why drupal.org is still on Drupal 5, and will stay that way for the forseeable future). It is also the reason why I am still using Drupal 5 on this site. I have been trying to figure out a way to get the same functionality, or at least most of it, in Drupal 6. This post summarises where I am with that at the moment.

I started out thinking CCK, Views, and Organic Groups could replace almost all of the functionality (version control integration is one that I can't see being done easily). I spent several hours working on this, and documenting what I had done. The limitation of this approach is that you can't seperate issues from the group page (or at least, I didn't see a way to do it). So the project page displays all the project issues as a comment listing. What you do get out of this approach is project membership management, notifications, project listing.

I next tried to remove Organic Groups from the mix. Instead of a project being a group, it would have an ACL (Access Control List). This would effectively become the group listing. Why did I go down this route? There are some other modules I wanted to try out, and they weren't working with OG. The new modules to try: comment CCK, talk, node comments, content access and acl (these last two can be used to control access to a project). Comment CCK allows comments to alter CCK fields in the node that they are commenting on, however it will not work for me at all in Drupal 6, and it does not seem to work in general with node comments. Node comments allows for a specific content type to be used as the comment type for a designated node. Talk allows for the comments for a node to be displayed on a seperate tab.

I think if all of these worked together project and project issue could be replaced. However, as it stands, I reckon maybe 50% of project and project issue can be duplicated, and depending on which route you take, you'll get a slightly different 50%!