Projects

Projects introduce the concept of a Kanban Board to a Forge repository. For those who haven't used Trello or Nextcloud Deck:

A Kanban Board is a way to organize tasks by their current stage of development. Boards will have cards that represent tasks that must be done (as well as any related information), and columns which the cards can be moved between. What the columns actually are will differ based on the needs of a project, but some basic boards may have a "Not Started," "In-Progress," and "Finished" columns, for example. Cards will be moved through these columns as the status of their work changes. Cards may also have other information in them, such as who the task is assigned to, when it must be done by, tags, etc.

In Forges, Kanban boards are usually called Projects, and are usually repository specific. While the visual of cards will still be invoked, the cards used in a Project Board are issues from the repository's issue tracker. This means that the issues store all the information on who, what, where, when, how, and why something must be done, and the project board organizes those issues into a chart of their overall progression and status towards completion.

Projects are often only used by very close knit (as in private) projects, or are only used by the core maintainers of a project. As Projects take quite a bit of people-wrangling overhead, and reflect the needs of a very consistently active and dedicated team, they are well suited to people who can dedicate the main force of their labor towards the repository, project, and organization developing the code. In short, the people who use projects are often the people who develop that specific piece of software as a job. Most open source projects will use Projects loosely, or not at all, as their labor force is much more erratic and much more unfocused due to the inability for volunteers to consistently provide organized labor.