Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Introducing Openbravo Forge

During the last months we have been working on easing the development and customization of Openbravo ERP. As part from this effort, modularity has been rolled out for Openbravo ERP R2.50, along with the central repository that holds the modules developed for Openbravo ERP. To complement all these initiatives for fuelling the creation of a dynamic ecosystem, today we are presenting the Openbravo Forge.

Openbravo Forge is a collaboration platform where third parties can independently develop projects which are synergistic with Openbravo software, therefore increasing the number of solutions available to the Openbravo ecosystem.

The Openbravo Forge objectives are to:
  • Provide an infrastructure for community members to develop verticals, plug-ins and localizations
  • Provide an infrastructure for partners and custom development to privately develop verticals, plug-ins and localizations
  • Provide a way to recognize peoples' contributions and make them visible
  • Host the central repository and the modularity repository (Openbravo Forge is key to developing modularity, which is introduced in Openbravo ERP R2.50).
  • Allow people to place their own ads linking to web-stores to sell licenses and/or support (people can place a little ad and link in their projects)
  • Provide a directory of available projects for Openbravo ERP & POS
  • Provide a member directory
It is important to notice that all community members will be able to use this infrastructure for free for any open source product.

The services that we provide for projects are forums, news, downloads, bug tracking, Subversion, Wiki and central repository modules, and obliviously to list them in the projects directory. All these services are independent and not connected to the tools that we use for the core (Openbravo Wiki, Issues and Mercurial). Forge is not an infrastructure to develop Openbravo ERP or POS for which we use Openbravo Issues, Openbravo Wiki and Mercurial services, but will rather provide community services. For Openbravo ERP & POS projects, think of the Forge as a replacement for our current SourceForge services. In case you still have doubts, there is a document that explains how the ecosystem toolmap will look after the migration.

We expect Openbravo community to embrace the Forge, especially to develop extensions and localizations. You can use your already existing accounts for Openbravo Wiki or Openbravo Mantis to login, since Openbravo Forge is connected to our Single Sign On infrastructure. If you have any issue logging in, please let us know at migration@openbravo.com

We think that Openbravo Forge is a tool that will provide tremendous value to our community and we will keep working on it throughout 2009 by having two major releases during this year and a few minor updates. We have some really cool features like Google Gadgets or RSS feeds at site and project level.

Openbravo ERP & POS Migration plans

Today we are entering the soft launch phase of the project where we expect to collect feedback from all of you.

Openbravo Forge is also is going to be the new home for Openbravo ERP and POS projects, replacing SourceForge services. On Saturday 28th of March, we will migrate all the forum messages for Openbravo ERP and POS projects to the new Forge. Starting from that date, http://forge.openbravo.com will be the home for these projects.

In case that your SourceForge username does not match with your Openbravo Single Sign on username, your previous activity in SourceForge will not be preserved. This is not desirable since you will loose all the recognition of the activity that you have previously generated and its ownership. If you are in this case, write your details in our Migration Account List and we will do the mapping for your account.

If you have any questions or issues, we have a public project to support our community in Forge related issues. If you think the answer to your question could be of interest to others, I’d ask you to post it in the project's forum.

During the next days we will blogging about the Forge, how it should be used, and we will keep you updated.

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