Sharing Openbravo Code Snippets

Openbravo Community contributor Victor Gaspar published a few days back a message where he shared with the community how he has managed to customize Openbravo ERP for some of his specific needs. For some time now, we wanted to have a code snippets section in our Wiki. Code snippets are small pieces of reusable code, like small cooking recipes.

We have created a category in the Openbravo Wiki called Code Snippets to hold documents that contain these pieces of reusable code. If you have small samples of how to customize Openbravo, small changes to the code that you think that may be useful to other people, please create a new page on the Openbravo Wiki and add it to this new category. You can also use the template CodeSnippets, like it is done in the already existent documents, to provide information of your snippets in a structured way.

You can check Victor's snippets CustomRemittance, AddFieldWebService and PrintButton. If you need any help or assistance on this, please do not hesitate to write to the developer's forum.

Openbravo Manifesto

Last weekend during the Openbravo Get Together in Barcelona we presented the Openbravo Manifesto (which was published both in English and Spanish). For a long time, many of us at Openbravo S.L wanted to clarify the extent of our commitment to Openbravo ERP and POS projects, and open source in general; we also wanted to share our values and belief with our Community. Openbravo was born as an open source project and some of its values are deeply rooted in the company.

The manifesto highlights Openbravo's company values: transparency, openness, collaboration, meritocracy, leadership, excellence and gratitude. We strive to live and keep these values in mind in everything that we do.

Most importantly, the Manifesto also highlights Openbravo company's commitments towards our Community: open source availability, open access to the code under development, open documentation and effective project infrastructure. We are also committed to honor other people's rights by providing proper attribution to any contribution and respecting other people's intellectual property; at the same time, we are ready to defend our Community's investment into the project through legal means if necessary.

We believe that publishing this Manisfesto is very important step ahead, since Openbravo S.L is currently the main sponsor of Openbravo projects. Additionally, we are proud of being the first company of our category that makes a public statement about its commitments to his Community. This underscores our belief that, from the very first day, our Community has been and will continue to be the key to success for the Openbravo projects.

More help on the community front

Hello everyone. I just want to ask you to give a warm welcome to Gil Forcada. He has joined the community departament at Openbravo. He will help doing Wiki editing tasks, answering forums questions, doing administrative tasks and collecting our community statistics. Gil speaks English, Spanish and Catalan.

Gil has been a contributor to the GNOME project for a few years, helping on the Catalan localization effort and helping on organizing GUADEC, the GNOME community annual European meeting. On top of that, Gil has been a founder and very active member of guifi, an open and free wireless network focus on Catalonia with more than 4.000 access points. All the infrastructure has been based on Linux and other open source solutions.

If you attend to our next Get Together in Barcelona this weekend, you will have the opportunity to meet him personally.

Third chat community meeting summary

Today, 2nd of April 14.00 GMT, we had our third community chat meeting at Openbravo to coordinate our efforts and to comment on new developments. We also discussed the topics that people added to the public agenda. We were around 35 participants and we talked for two hours. There is a full log available. You can use the Open Discussion forum or the appropriated forum for your topic if you want to comment something on what has been discussed or you still have a question that we could not answer at the time.

Some highlights from the meeting

Paolo Juvara explained what is the current status of the Openbravo ERP 2.40, building on his previous public comments, and highlighted some of the most significant features Openbravo Core:

1. Keyboard operation: his project not only provides shortcuts for all the functions in the system and allows its mouse-less operations; it also allows you to configure the default first field where the focus is placed when you navigate to a new record. We believe this will significantly reduce the number of clicks required to perform data entry.
2. UI feedback: this project will provide visual clues to the state of the system (record in edit mode, record in read only mode, processing, loading data, etc.).
3. Requisitions: this project significantly improves the Procurement footprint of Openbravo and enables enterprises to automate the buying process,from expression of demand to PO authoring. The Procurement flow is further improved with another small project that allows to simplify the receiving process by allow people to receive by PO number.
4. Multi-schema accounting: this capability allows you to account a single transaction multiple times, according to different account schemas.
   

In practice, this enables operating multi-national organizations with Openbravo where different organizations need to report to the local legal authorities plus the parent company.

Adrian Romero also commented on the future plans for Openbravo POS that are already on our roadmap, including, a new customer module with costumer and warehouse integration, support for skins and enhancements in the localization area.

We aim to schedule the next chat during May 2008. We will keep you posted.