Openbravo community plans for 2008

Year 2007 has been a tremendous year for Openbravo. During this year we focused our community efforts on adopting the best processes and methodologies for Openbravo ERP development.

Our communication and transparency has been greatly enhanced including: publishing and updating our roadmaps, setting up IRC channels and having regular chat meetings, start using mailing lists or the blogging and Planet efforts. Another accomplishment has been in the documentation area. Openbravo ERP started as a home grown solution for enterprises and its documentation was modest. Openbravo community have been working hard on extending the Openbravo documentation. Still many efforts are necessary but a good progression is made every week.

During year 2008 we plan to focus on providing a better infrastructure for people developing Openbravo ERP and POS, and also, for people working on Openbravo related projects, like plugins, verticals or localizations.

Let me give you some highlights of our planned services:

• A better Wiki. Building on top of our Wiki we plan to add more exciting functionality: enable users to rate articles, activate the discussion pages to allow people to comment on already existing articles, a better category system, better integration with other Openbravo news sources using RSS.
• New forums. This is has been a long request from our community: to have a better and more powerful forum system.
• New bug tracking system. Our current bug tracking system at SourceForge has many limitations. We have been evaluating different solutions we would make a decision soon.
  
• Single sign for all the community services enabling users to authenticate once and gain access to the resources of multiple community systems.
• Openbravo Forge. Starting with Openbravo ERP R2.4x series, to be released in June 2008, it would be more easy to develop and deploy plugins, verticals and extensions. The objective of Openbravo Forge is to provide hosting services for projects of Openbravo contributors and to boost collaboration between the different efforts. Services like forums, source control, bug tracking, news publishing or file downloads would be provided.
  

This is the direction that we are working and we hope that it would happen during 2008. We are focusing first on the new bug tracking system and Wiki and then in the rest of the services. We ask you please to be patient. Any feedback on these plans this is really appreciated.

Anyone willing to provide additional services or resources to help to build our community is more than welcome.