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OpenGoo is an open source web office developed by Feng Office and the OpenGoo community. It can be used for project management, including the scheduling of tasks and milestones, document storage, contact and calendar management, email receiving (POP3 or IMAP) and sending(SMTP) and runs on a PHP webserver with MySQL installed.

OpenGoo can be downloaded here and is easily installed on a websever, with minimal setup needed. If you don’t have experience with webservers it might be a good idea to get the sys admin to handle the install. Never the less the install is quite straight forward, with installation instruction located in the readme.txt file.

When installed on a local firewall, OpenGoo has the advantages of a web interface without having sensitive data being transferred to and fro a remote server somewhere on the internet. You have 100% control over your data, even allowing for custom encryption to be set for the more paranoid among us, whereas other online services limit your control. No internet connection is needed to use the application and thus can be completely isolated from the outside world. Or it could be installed on a remote server that is accessed by different people all over the internet.

I quite like the interface of OpenGoo. It uses the extJS framework to render the UI and site layouts. It utilizes AJAX to update content dynamically giving an enjoyable user experience.

So, this is a very nice piece of software, but what if we want to add some custom features? The one thing the project is greatly lacking is development documentation. There is limited information in the openGoo WIKI which isn’t at all satisfactory and quite frankly no help to the novice.

After browsing through the wiki, forum and blog, I decided the only way to get anywhere was to dive head on into the code. To my delight, the code itself is well commented and any PHP programmer that has some experiece with the MVC (model view controller) method of programming would catch on quickly to the basic structure of the application.

This is the first blog in a series of blogs on openGoo, that I hope will help other developers with their customizations. In the next blog I’ll cover how to create Hooks in openGoo and in another future post I plan to give an example of creating a custom “Bulletin Board” addon, explaining some of the MVC structure I’ve uncovered.

( Check out http://www.opengoo.org/ for more info. or http://demo.opengoo.org/ to check out the demo )