Client's panel for my website.

Question

As a freelance developer I deal with clients mostly by contacting them via email/im. That isn't working bad, but I'm thinking of a more professional approach with client communication panel for my website. Client basically will be given login/password and access it to see previews and comment them.

I'm fine with writing the application myself, but since so many developers have similar things on their websites, maybe there already is some solution that I could just reuse?

//edit

well, I should probably explain myself a bit clearer. I'm fine with showing websites as they're being properly built/coded. It's just communication and design stage that I'd like to move from mail/im to some simple web application.

Theoretically project management tools would do, but they overly complicated and I need just simple functionality to comment (in threads ideally) and attach images. Probably will want more later, but that's all I can think of now.

Answer 1

"Accessing it to see previews" would mean vastly different things to different people - you probably just want to do something like having a password-protected preview area - if you're making websites it could live at http://preview.example.com for example.

There are various sorts of systems that might to the second part though, a Wiki might work, or FogBugz, or Trac.

Answer 2

It might already be 'overly complicated' but you could take a look at Request Tracker: http://bestpractical.com/rt/

Answer 3

I found collabtive being a brilliant all-in-one software.
Got all I really needed.