I'm in the process of switching from an experimental installation of Redmine to a company wide use. We do use some plugins that are mandatory for us such as redmine_backlog and redmine_gitosis (unmaintained, several forks exists). While redmine released 1.2.0, chiliproject just released 1.5.0 and ensure the themes and plugins are compatible.
The reasons that made them take the decision to fork redmine makes one feel there is a strong motivation of supporting the project. It also seems that chiliproject has more contributors and has more frequent updates.
So I'm looking for pros and cons for using one of these projects in a production-like environment !
Thanks,
Mathieu
Bias disclaimer: I am the ChiliProject lead and a former Redmine core contributor.
As far as code and features go: ChiliProject was forked in January so there are quite a few changes between it and Redmine. I'll try to quickly describe how we (ChiliProject) do our releases and what is included in them:
The ChiliProject 1.x releases include:
The ChiliProject 2.x releases include:
If you want details about the exact changes you can check out what was included in our previous versions. I also used Google Spreadsheet to track what I pulled into ChiliProject from Redmine 1.2:
https://www.chiliproject.org/boards/2/topics/239
For the non-code differences (community), the Why Fork? and FAQ pages are the best places too look.
As far as themes and plugin compatibility: they should work with either project at this point. Keeping compatibility is a big focus of mine right now, since I don't want to have to go and update all of my plugins whenever there is a new release of Redmine or ChiliProject.
Hope this helps.