[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last 5 weeks until September 28th

[Timotheus P. <tim...@po...>]

== What happened in the past 5 weeks ==
* Bernd is working on the financial development reports and porting
them from Petra 2.x to OpenPetra.
* Bernd and Wolfgang B and Emily have worked on translating the two
OpenPetra flyers from English to German. They will be published soon
on the website.
* Matthias H has worked on the GL Batch export screen and actual
export of Batches, Journals and Transactions. He has now started to
work on the Setup screen for Analysis Attributes.
* Timotheus has created the first NUnitForms test for the GL Batch
screen. We want to do more of these.
* We had a second Alpha release which was needed for a small charity
in the UK that has started to use OpenPetra for managing addresses.
This is a great encouragement to us, to have the first non-developer
working with OpenPetra. We have made some improvements for the Special
Type handling which they needed. We have also increased the security
of the program, eg. by improving the enforcing of access permissions.
* Timotheus has worked on a setup for hosted OpenPetra, which helps
charities to work on a central database, and not to worry about
hosting and backup and updates. If you are interested in benefitting
from that service for yourself, please write to in...@so....
* Quite a lot of work went into the screen for importing partners from
a text file into OpenPetra. We want to combine the multiple situations
into one screen, where partners get imported from another database or
from a CSV list of partners.
The purpose of this is that we have another possible candidate for
using OpenPetra very soon. OpenPetra might become the solution that
hosts the online applications for hundreds of teenagers from all
across Europe and even some beyond, who would be able to register for
the conference on a web interface. The data will be collected securely
into an OpenPetra database. The offices of each country where the
applicants come from, will be able to download the data into their own
Petra 2.x for accounting and personnel purposes. This will help the
offices to avoid typing lots of application forms manually into Petra
2.x.
The same application web interface will be used for entering
applications for the Personnel department, which should also save lots
of work and help staff to have time to talk to applicants and answer
their questions.

== What did not happen in that time ==
* The tutorial has not been finished yet, especially the Finance
module is not documented at all yet.
* More work should have been done on the Finance module, foreign
currencies and more.

== What should happen in the next weeks ==
* Improve tutorial and demo database.
* Bernd will finish the financial reports and wrap up his work with OM
by the end of October.
* Matthias H will continue on the GL module, mainly Analysis
Attributes for accounts, and allowing users to enter an analysis value
for a GL transaction to an account that is associated with an analysis
attribute.
* Wolfgang U will start working full-time for Timotheus Pokorra
Software on October 1st, and will look into how to define requirements
for the Gift module, and then later probably also start working on the
implementation. We want to improve the current way of defining what
needs to be done and to specify what exactly needs to be done to make
the software development process more easier and avoid some unwelcome
surprises...
* Matthias G will start in the middle of October to work 2 days a week
also for Timotheus Pokorra Software. He will look into improving our
quality of code and development processes. This will help us to
provide better releases, and to have some structures to make it normal
to write tests for bugs etc.
* Christian will work on validation of the values entered on a screen.
Most of that will be generated automatically. He will also implement
the possibility to delete on the many setup screens, which can be
quite complicated since it involves cascading deletes etc.
* Timotheus will switch the i18n from Mono.Unix GetCatalog to GNU
gettext for c#, which should solve some smaller issues. He will also
invest time into the new members of the team to introduce them to what
Petra already does and what needs to be done.
* Rob and Wolfgang B will work on creating a rough roadmap for
OpenPetra and OM, so that OM can start raising the funds needed to
bring OpenPetra to a state where it can be used in OM.