openpetraorg-weekly — weekly updates of the project, same as blog

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update October 2016: Current status of the project

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

There has not been a news update for the Open Source OpenPetra for
ages. Nevertheless, the work has continued. Especially the friends at
ICT have been busy working on stabilizing OpenPetra, and since
December 2015 they are rolling out their internal version of OpenPetra
to various offices around the world! That is a huge achievement, and
reason to be thankful and proud (in a good way)!

One challenge has been to merge the changes from ICT back into the
Open Source version of OpenPetra. Some bits are not needed for the
Open Source OpenPetra, others are not allowed for licensing reasons.
Some issues that are being solved in the closed ICT branch of
OpenPetra deal with .NET remoting and database connections in
AppDomains, which we don’t have in the Open Source version. Despite
all that, we are now in sync again between the two OpenPetras, up to
the latest July release. See the 2016-07 release on
https://www.openpetra.org/download-openpetraorg

Unfortunately, there is still not a community around the Open Source
OpenPetra. Therefore there has not been any progress on documentation,
tutorials, and stabilizing the core functionality for a proper
release. On the other hand, without that documentation and level of
stability, it is hard to get people interested. Some people have
expressed interest, and anyone is welcome to join us on the IRC
(https://www.openpetra.org/community-irc) or on the forum
(https://forum.openpetra.org/)!

A lot of energy has gone into providing uptodate packages of Mono in
Fedora and in Epel7 (for CentOS7). The effort was worth it: when
CentOS 7.3 will be released probably around December 2016, then Mono
4.2 will be available in Epel7. You can already test it by enabling
epel-testing. The aim is to not need a special copr repository or self
hosted build of Mono to run OpenPetra in production on a CentOS
server.

There has also been work on updating uncrustify to a newer version,
which supports new features of C# 6. This project still has not been
finished yet.

There are probably more things to mention, but hopefully the news
updates will be more regular from now on…

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update December 2014: work of past months and friendly fork

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

Statement from OM:

The last months have been used to on the one hand round off
functionality that was nearly complete and on the other hand work on
features that had not been started. As mentioned in the last News
Update we work closely together with OM Switzerland on the future
development. As a direct outcome of the visit to OM Switzerland the
link between finance and partner information has been improved, which
results in an easier workflow from a data entry perspective.

Looking at the future development of OpenPetra it became clear that OM
has a number of unique requirements. Currently it’s impossible to come
up with a generic solution in each case. To meet OM’s needs we felt it
necessary to now start an OM specific private fork of the OpenPetra
project. This does not mean the Open Source idea is abandoned, nor
does it mean that the Open Source project will not be developed any
further. OM will continue to be a major contributor to the OpenPetra
Open Source project. Enhancements which are not OM-specific will be
taken over and made publicly available. For this reason we named it a
“friendly fork”.
When OM is forking off, Timotheus will take over the responsibility of
maintaining the Open Source project. We believe that this is the way
forward to serve both worlds best.

Notes from Timotheus:

In the past days, the code of OpenPetra has moved to Github: use the
shortcut http://code.openpetra.org. This is one of several steps how
we want to prepare the way for an active community of developers and
users around OpenPetra. You will see more details for the
infrastructure of the OpenPetra community appear first on the forum at
https://forum.openpetra.org and later on the OpenPetra website and
monthly updates mailinglist.

The copyright of OpenPetra will remain with OM. Therefore each
developer that contributes towards OpenPetra needs to agree to a
Contributor License Agreement
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement) which we
still have to write down. This will make it easier to switch to
another license in the future.

The new place to report issues for OpenPetra will be at Github:
http://issues.openpetra.org

Today, we release a new version of OpenPetra, that contains all the
work from the OM team up to the friendly fork, and also includes the
extensions that Timotheus has worked on over the past 2 years. Please
read the release notes for further details:
https://www.openpetra.org/openpetra-2014-12-alpha

Timotheus will publish a roadmap towards a Beta for OpenPetra and a
stable version soon.

You are welcome to discuss this news update in our new Discourse Forum
at https://forum.openpetra.org/t/update-december-2014-work-of-past-months-and-friendly-fork/338!

[Openpetraorg-weekly] 0.3.0 Alpha Release of OpenPetra.org

[Christian K. (ICT) <Chr...@om...>]

OpenPetra.org 0.3.0 Alpha has been released!


Please download the Windows standalone installer here: Download OpenPetra Alpha 0.3.0-0 Standalone installer<http://sourceforge.net/projects/openpetraorg/files/openpetraorg/OpenPetra.org%20Alpha%200.3/OpenPetraSetup-0.3.0.0.exe/download>

The changes and improvements of this particular version can be found in the OpenPetra 0.3.0 News Update<http://www.openpetra.org/openpetra-0-3-0-news-update>.

For a detailed list of all bugs solved for this release, see Bugs closed in 0.3.0<http://openpetraorg.sourceforge.net/ReleaseDetails/BugsFixed_Alpha-0.3.0.htm>


Thank you for your interest and support,


ChristianK for the OpenPetra developers

________________________________
OM International Services (Carlisle) Ltd - Unit B Clifford Court, Cooper Way - Carlisle CA3 0JG - United Kingdom
Charity reg no: 1112655 - Company reg no: 5649412 (England and Wales)

[Openpetraorg-weekly] 0.2.28 Alpha Release of OpenPetra.org

[Christian K. (ICT) <Chr...@om...>]

The new release is a smaller one as not much new functionality has been added.

The biggest improvement is the filter and find functionality that is now available to almost all screens.
Since testing efforts have been increased the main focus was on fixing a number of detected bugs to ensure the usability and stability of OpenPetra.

Further details can be found in the release notes.

The new release can be downloaded here<http://www.openpetra.org/download-openpetraorg>.


Thank you for your interest and support,

ChristianK for the OpenPetra developers

________________________________
OM International Services (Carlisle) Ltd - Unit B Clifford Court, Cooper Way - Carlisle CA3 0JG - United Kingdom
Charity reg no: 1112655 - Company reg no: 5649412 (England and Wales)

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last six months until September 23rd, 2013

[Christian K. (ICT) <Chr...@om...>]

Releases:

*         OpenPetra Alpha 0.2.26 was released on September 23rd, 2013.

The release contains a lot of new functionality and bug fixes! It can be downloaded from here<http://www.openpetra.org/en/download-openpetraorg>. A Windows installer is available.


The main focus of this release has been the Finance Module. Many of the enhanced features are found in there. The Partner and Personnel Module also saw improvements; the Personnel Module is close to completion regarding its functionality! We've even managed to work on the Conference module, enabling basic functionality.



The most obvious change for many OpenPetra screens is a slightly different layout: Quite a few users requested that Buttons that perform actions on a list of data should be placed below the list of data rather than to the right of it. We implemented that change, resulting in less mouse movements needed to perform list-related actions, plus in some extra space in which data can be shown. The freed up space will be used by the Filter/Find panel, but only when it is switched on. We are planning to implement that panel in many screens in the near future. Apart from this we took other results of user tests that were conducted earlier this year on board and implemented several improvements that were requested.



AlanP and ChristianK spent time implementing the Delete functionality throughout the entire OpenPetra suite. Nearly all lists of data where a deletion of rows is possible now support both single-row and multi-row deletion. Automatic checks are performed to confirm that rows that are to be deleted are not referenced in other parts of the application.



ChristianK also did much of the technical 'groundwork' for the implementation of the 'Filter and Find' functionality, which will be part of the next minor release.

In addition, ChristianK performed several technical investigations, in particular for the Mail Merge functionality and the Partner Contact Details. The implementation of the Partner Contact Details is under way but requires further changes in other parts of the application.



WolfgangB added functionality for maintaining Partner Interests on the Partner Edit Screen. He adapted Personnel and Partner Module screens to comply with recent code templates changes and updated the database design by removing unused tables and fields.

He also helped PeterS to get started on the team, identified tasks for PeterS and introduced him to those.



PeterS was mainly working on the Conference Module where he created a screen to maintain and select Conferences. Through that many of the previously inaccessible features of that Module can now be used. Adjustments to the Post Code Regions and Post Code Ranges screens were also introduced by him.

In addition PeterS improved the database conversion from Petra 2.x to OpenPetra.



ChrisT mainly worked on Budget maintenance and incorporated the new Delete functionality into various screens in the Gift and General Ledger Sub-modules. Then he focused on the import and export interfaces for several financial topics and improved the performance of various functions in the General Ledger and Gift Batch processes.



TimI's primary task was the follow-up on reported bugs. He has fixed many of these in the Finance Module. In addition to that he was also tackling and solving several performance issues, in particular in the Reports area.



TimotheusP has finished his work in the Finance Module on the important Month End and Year End functionalities. A full GL Batch Reversal is now possible, too. Furthermore he has been working on directly exporting Report results to MS Excel.





Technical bits:

*         ChristianK resolved a number of issues in the OpenPetra database access layer and vastly improved the way in which dependent records in the database are found (needed for the implementation of the Delete functionality for lists of data).

*         TimotheusP worked on a standalone version of OpenPetra that does not require a separate server process any more (available only in an upcoming release).



Other news:

*         PeterS joined the OpenPetra  core team as a software engineer in April this year.

________________________________
OM International Services (Carlisle) Ltd - Unit B Clifford Court, Cooper Way - Carlisle CA3 0JG - United Kingdom
Charity reg no: 1112655 - Company reg no: 5649412 (England and Wales)

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last five months until March 19th, 2013

[Christian K. (ICT) <Chr...@om...>]

Releases:

*         OpenPetra Alpha 0.2.24 was released on March 19th, 2013.

The release contains a lot of new functionality and bug fixes! It can be downloaded from here<http://www.openpetra.org/en/download-openpetraorg>. A Windows installer is available.

The OpenPetra release 0.2.24 follows up the achievements of the previous version, which proved to be the most stable so far. This then enabled us to thoroughly test essential functions and to fix many of the raised issues. We continued implementing the validation framework into various screens, extended the functionality of the different modules and further improved the usability of the application - in particular when handling additional ledgers. Many setup screens have been extended and items that previously were provided by demo data only can now be maintained within OpenPetra.

WolfgangB introduced the Recurring GL Batch Screen in the Finance Module. He also worked on General Ledger setup functionality, introducing a screen for ledger settings which includes defining accounting periods and calendar, enabling/disabling sub systems, etc.. An overview page of general ledger settings is now provided, too.
In the Partner Module WolfgangB added functionality to combine, intersect and subtract extracts as well as an option to add/delete partner types for all partner records in an extract at once. It is now also possible to delete a partner record.

ChristianK Introduced a MessageBox that lists Forms that need to be closed in order for the user to be able to close the OpenPetra Client.
He finished the basic implementation of the 'Shepherd Framework' (this got started as a Student Project). This framework will facilitate the creation of 'Shepherds' when it is finished - 'Shepherds' are user interfaces that will guide a user step-by-step in a data entry process.
ChristianK also worked on our proposed documentation wiki system that will in the end hopefully provide a single-source publishing solution for the OpenPetra User Guides.

TimotheusP: Annual gift receipts for the Nazareth Charity have again been printed with OpenPetra. This is the third year we are printing annual gift receipts with OpenPetra already.
Timotheus worked on an initial version of the finance details on Partner Edit, where one can maintain the bank account of the donors, and the annual gift receipt flag.
For OM Germany, Timotheus has implemented an export of finance data according to GDPdU.
Timotheus has worked on OpenPetra.Now, which aims to be a hosted solution of OpenPetra for smaller charities and church offices. This service will be offered by the company of Timotheus, SolidCharity.

ChrisT continued his work on the Gift and GL batch screen with a particular focus on gift reversals, analysis Attributes for transactions and recurring gift screen functionality in cooperation with WolfgangB. In addition he fixed several issues in the ICH Stewardship area.

Since January Alan P has been able to spend more time on Open Petra than in 2012.
He has fixed a bug with the grid control that meant that the current record did not always scroll completely into view when the selection changed. After that he implemented some standard code to catch the inadvertent creation of a duplicate record and display a relevant message within the standard validation framework.
AlanP has spent some time fixing bugs and improving the behaviour of the two exchange rate screens.

TimI has been fixing many issues that have been raised by developers and users. Plenty of minor changes especially in the area of finance reporting and Accounts Payable will have an impact on the overall usability.

DouglasM has completed the progress dialogues for the GL and Gift batch import. He is currently working on the Gift batch validation.

Technical bits:

*         ChristianK introduced an additional option for a conditional OpenPetra Server shutdown.

*         He also implemented Singleton (=single-instance) Forms capability (needed e.g. for modal Find screens such as the Partner Find screen) and made changes to wherever a Currency Amount is displayed or entered: the Currency (e.g. 'EUR' for Euros) is now displayed separately from the Amount (which is still editable in the Text entry field).

*         TimotheusP has worked on a redesign of the communication between client and server, which reduces complexity for the developers and makes the software faster for the user. This will go into trunk soon after the next release.


Other news:

*         DouglasM joined the OpenPetra Team as a part-time software engineer at the end of November last year.

*         Next year the ICCM Europe conference will be held in Mosbach/Germany (5 - 8 February 2014). This will be a good opportunity for the OpenPetra team to be present! http://www.iccm-europe.org/.

________________________________
OM International Services (Carlisle) Ltd - Unit B Clifford Court, Cooper Way - Carlisle CA3 0JG - United Kingdom
Charity reg no: 1112655 - Company reg no: 5649412 (England and Wales)

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Version 0.2.22-1 Alpha verfuegbar

[Christian K. (ICT) <Chr...@om...>]

Wir haben Version 0.2.22-1 Alpha von OpenPetra freigegeben. Das Installationsprogramm kann hier heruntergeladen werden: http://t.co/ajOn3E1N

Es gibt auch einen Forum-Eintrag welcher das neue Hauptmenü zeigt: http://t.co/gJdeoOGz


Vielen Dank für Ihr Interesse und Ihre Unterstützung!


ChristianK für die OpenPetra-Entwickler

________________________________
OM International Services (Carlisle) Ltd - Unit B Clifford Court, Cooper Way - Carlisle CA3 0JG - United Kingdom
Charity reg no: 1112655 - Company reg no: 5649412 (England and Wales)

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last five months until October 15th, 2012

[Timotheus P. <in...@op...>]

Releases:

OpenPetra Alpha 0.2.22 was released on October 15th, 2012.
The release contains a lot of new functionality and bug fixes! It can
be downloaded from http://www.openpetra.org/en/download-openpetraorg.
Packages for Windows, Linux and MacOS are available.

The main goal for this release was to improve the stability of the application.
There were two main topics that needed to be dealt with in order to
achieve that goal.
On the one hand we increased the use of the validation framework
throughout the application and that way made data entry more safe.
On the other hand we were facing major problems in the grid handling
that we’ve now overcome to a large extent.
The overall look and feel has improved, too and – most of all – this
new version of OpenPetra is much more stable than the previous one.
Furthermore we’ve added new functions to almost every module and have
been fixing a number of bugs that
have been reported in various areas. Apart from the obvious change in
the user interface, quite some effort has been put into the
architecture and
standardizing use of underlying code. This significantly reduces
complexity and helps to maintain OpenPetra long term.
The current version still is in alpha state. We therefore missed the
goal of having a feature complete version by the end of this year, but
we continue working on it.

The OpenPetra Team meetings in June went very well. Apart from
discussing the achievements and struggles we were facing, the main
focus was on
testing. We discussed our testing strategy again and seek to involve
key users more. Meanwhile we have a Windows machine that can be used
for that purpose and is available to selected users within the
company.

AlanP was deeply involved with the daily exchange rates screen, when
he figured out that the issues he discovered there were
part of system wide problems. He therefore put very much effort into
fixing grid issues. The grid now shows a consistent behaviour
throughout the application and drastically improved event handling.
Since the work on the grid was more essential, his changes to the
daily exchange rates did not make it into this realease, but will
follow soon.

TimotheusP: in the past months, the major change from on his side was
the change to single port remoting.
This allows the server to run just on one port, which is good for
firewall security. Previously, a special port was opened for every
connecting client.
He also prepared for the next generation of the webbased interface
which is currently used for TeenStreet, just using ext.js instead of
ext.net.
To provide relevant test data two better demo databases have been
added, at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openpetraorg/files/openpetraorg/demodata/.
One contains 3500 participants from 20 countries for a conference,
another contains two ledgers with invoices and donations.
Additionally he worked on the bank interface dealing with importing
bank files and matching the gifts to donors in the database.

ChrisT worked extensively and mainly on the Gift Batch and GL Batch
related screens, fixing numerous bugs in relation to basic form and
tab control and introducing business and accounting logic to the
form’s functionality to ensure OM’s financial requirements and working
practice are met. This basically meant a re-write of those screens to
meet current programming standards. Additionally ChrisT worked
alongside Alan on fixing the problems in the grid.

ChristianK provided a ‘facelift’ for the Main Menu– the right hand
side of the Main Menu now looks like it contains tasks that one can do
and one can click on. It is visually more pleasing than before, uses
icons and provides better usability as well. ChristianK was one of the
developers who was involved in fixing several problems with the Grid
(List/Detail views). He fixed many bugs in the Partner Find screen, in
the Partner Edit screen and in many other areas.

WolfgangB introduced a number of new screens to create extracts,
taking the available number up to 17. It is now also possible to purge
extracts depending on date and add/delete subscriptions or update
other information for all partners in an extract in one go. Finding
existing extracts is now also easier with the help of a new find
screen. He also introduced functionality to enter both event and field
applications in Personnel data and improved the underlying database
structure. Apart from that various improvements and bugfixes were made
to the Partner Edit screen in the Partner and the Personnel data part.

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last three months until May 25th, 2012

[Christian K. (ICT) <Chr...@om...>]

Releases:

*                    OpenPetra Alpha 0.2.18 was released on March 10th, 2012.

*                    OpenPetra Alpha 0.2.20 was released on May 25th, 2012.
Both releases contain a lot of new functionality and bug fixes! They can be downloaded from here<http://www.openpetra.org/en/download-openpetraorg>. Packages for Windows, Linux and MacOS are available.

Since the last News Update in February we have achieved significant progress in all of the OpenPetra Modules. We are now working on the missing bits and pieces and are aiming for a feature complete version later this year. With the current speed in development comes a high demand for testing.
In recent months many bugs have been reported due to the fact that data validation had not yet been implemented. Because of that wrong data could be entered in many screens, which in turn lead to errors in the program. Since ChristianK finished the Data Validation Framework there are ongoing activities across all OpenPetra Modules to implement data validation wherever it is needed. Through that testers (and later users) will receive notices of wrongly entered data while it is being entered and they should not be able to store invalid data anymore.
Once data validation is introduced widely we will be able to enter a phase of extended testing. A prerequisite for that is the creation of a Test Platform, and that needs to be populated with generated random yet valid test data for all the OpenPetra Modules. We have started to set up that Test Platform and are now developing additional tools for testing.
We will have a team meeting in June. Among other topics, testing procedures and the documentation of test cases will be discussed. Another topic will be the upgrade and migration of the current Petra installations within OM to OpenPetra. The initial plan for that is to have OpenPetra running in parallel to Petra for quite some time in several OM offices. That will allow us to validate results and make them comparable.
Other work on OpenPetra:
*        TimotheusP created the Alpha 0.2.18 and Alpha 0.2.20 releases. He fixed a number of longstanding problems on the Address Tab of the Partner Edit screen (Partner Module) and fixed the Budget Consolidation (Finance Module) together with TimI, which he followed up with a code review and optimisation where it was needed. TimotheusP also added several Unit Tests to the Finance Module to automate testing and increased the record pool of random yet valid test data used in the demo database. Furthermore a tool for the data migration from Petra 2.x to OpenPetra was introduced by him. He is currently working on the Gift Import from Bank Statements (Finance Module).
*        WolfgangB finished work on Personnel Data Screens (Personnel/Partner Module) which included fixing of various minor Bugs, brushing up of the user interface and implementing the new Data Validation Framework so the users are only allowed to enter valid data. He also added a number of new Extracts for use in the Partner, Personnel and Finance Modules, increasing the total number of currently available Extracts to 14.
*        ChristianK finished the Data Validation Framework and is currently documenting it. He moved from the U.K. to Austria and continues to work fulltime on OpenPetra from there, after taking a break due to the relocation. In numbers, the OpenPetra core team members that are 'remote' are now more than the team members that are based in Carlisle, England...
*        TimI finished working on the Accounts Payable Subsystem (Finance Module). He also did some investigative work on the implementation of the Main Menu before adding some tweaks in the area of the Budget Subsystem (Finance Module).
*        ChristopherT worked on the International Clearing House Subsystem, including the creation of the HOSA statements, on the email distribution, and on their respective Unit Testing  (all in the Finance Module). He is now moving onto Recurring Batches for the General Ledger and Gift Subsystems of the Finance Module.
*        AlanP has continued to work on 'Maintain Table' screens.  In recent weeks this has involved adding validation using the new Data Validation Framework.  So far he has added the same validation that is found in Petra's Maintain Table screens to more than 30 of those screens in Open Petra.  He recently had a 'holiday project' in which he got debugging and development in the Visual Studio 2010 environment working again and went on to enhance the generation of Project and Solution files for all supported Integrated Development Environments (IDE's), so that important Non-C#-files are included and as a result can now be edited within the IDE's with ease.  This results in an improved coding and debugging experience for the developers.

"Technical bits":

 *   TimotheusP did some experiments with jQuery with the aim of providing a part of the OpenPetra application in a web browser.
 *   TimotheusP also 'refactored' our Forms Generator and resolved a number of layout problems that were exposed by the OpenPetra Client when it was run on a Linux Desktop.

Thank you for your interest and support,

ChristianK for the OpenPetra developers

________________________________
OM International Limited - Unit B Clifford Court, Cooper Way - Carlisle CA3 0JG - United Kingdom
Charity reg no: 1112655 - Company reg no: 5649412 (England and Wales)

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last six weeks until February 8th, 2012

[Christian K. (ICT) <Chr...@om...>]

We had an excellent time in January with eight students and a professor from Calvin College, U.S.A (http://www.calvin.edu/) who came to the OM offices in Carlisle (England) to work on OpenPetra. During their two-week inter-term overseas experience they were assigned to several projects. The students got to know quite a few aspects of the OpenPetra development and created very useful functionality.
For several weeks a major focus of our team was preparing for the visit of the students and so everyone was excited to actually start working together with them on the various projects. It was amazing to see how quickly the students picked up their tasks and how eager they were to contribute to the project. After a brief introduction and just a few days of working on the projects they produced a remarkable output: in the end they created ten Personnel Data Screens, four new Extract screens, did research on single source publishing for user guides and application help<http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/openpetraorg/index.php?title=Common_Goals_for_the_Two_Documentation-related_Projects> and created Unit Tests that automate the testing of user privileges on screens. That result proves that it is rather easy for developers to start working with OpenPetra's technical setup and architecture and that new developers can contribute to the project to a certain extent without having had extensive training beforehand.
Other work on OpenPetra:
*        WolfgangB created a framework for the creation of Extracts, after initial work from TimotheusP. He is currently working on refining the Extracts framework which includes filtering by address fields, saving of settings, etc. The decision has been taken to incorporate the Extract screens into the Reporting area to reduce double effort and improve usability.
*        ChristianK is in the process of further improving the Data Validation framework, automating source code generation so programmers need to write less program code for data validation, among other notable improvements.
*        Tim Ingham has continued work towards the completion of the functionality of the Accounts Payable system. Among other improvements the reversing of a payment is now working.
*        ChristopherT has worked on the Budget sub-system of the Finance Module. He is now working on Phase 2 of the International Clearing House sub-system of the Finance Module.
*        AlanP continued to work on Maintain Table screens and lately worked on more advanced ones (Local Data Label screens). He also did an update to the OpenPetra Developer's Assistant this month, improving its functionality.
*        Since there was interest in the forum and on private email for testing the Linux Client of OpenPetra, TimotheusP fixed the build for the Linux Client, and it is now again working on Linux. The fix will be part of the next release (0.2.18). You might want to have a look at the Forum post https://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/openpetraorg/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4#p509 if this topic is of interest to you.
*        The gift receipts for the Nazareth Charity have been printed by TimotheusP for the third year running. Work is underway to move the whole bookkeeping of that charity into OpenPetra.
*        Two core developers of OpenPetra, TimotheusP and WolfgangB, are attending the ICCM Europe conference<http://www.iccm-europe.org/> in the Netherlands (8 - 11 February, 2012).
*        We have put updated screenshots of OpenPetra on our website to reflect the current state of the program (you can have a look at them here<http://www.openpetra.org/en/screenshots>).
*        We are looking forward to an evaluation phase in March where we want to review the whole project, have a closer look at its achievements and re-prioritise tasks.

"Technical bits":

 *   The web-based backend for the online registration for conferences works now with the latest Mono and Ext.Net packages. See the blog article written by TimotheusP at http://tpokorra.blogspot.com/2012/02/extnet-12-and-mono-210-on-ubuntu.html
 *   The work on a Linux remote developer's machine got delayed a bit, but it will be announced soon. We might use that as a testing environment for an early round of user acceptance tests.
 *   TimotheusP is working on rewriting the layout manager of the generated WinForms (thereby removing the dependency on the WinForms TableLayoutPanel), which should improve the screen layouts on both Windows and Linux clients.

*         We can now create Solution and Project Files in the SharpDevelop 4.1 file formats.

Thank you for your interest and support,

ChristianK for the OpenPetra developers.

________________________________
OM International Limited - Unit B Clifford Court, Cooper Way - Carlisle CA3 0JG - United Kingdom
A company limited by guarantee - Charity reg no: 1112655 - Company reg no: 5649412 (England and Wales)

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last six weeks until December 22nd, 2011

[Timotheus P. <in...@op...>]

•       Overall we picked up speed again in development over the past
months. The newer team members contribute to OpenPetra to a larger
extent now and are making good progress.
•       We have released OpenPetra Version 0.2.16 Alpha on December 22nd,
2011. Previously Version 0.2.14 Alpha was released on 10 November
2011. For details see
http://www.openpetra.org/en/download-openpetraorg/
•       ChristianK was and is busy preparing for the visit of eight students
and a professor from Calvin College, U.S.A (http://www.calvin.edu/).
He is co-ordinating the lining up of various projects and will be
involved with several projects during their two-week inter-term
overseas experience in Carlisle, England. A good mix of programming
and research & development awaits them. We are looking forward to them
contributing  to OpenPetra!
•       ChristianK finished work on the framework for data validation which
he made a start on earlier this year. This framework helps the
software engineers to check data entered in all kinds of screens
against certain rules, e.g. a number entered must be positive, a date
entered must lie in the future, etc. The framework makes this easy and
consistent for the software engineers and the users get consistent and
helpful messages across the application if data they entered isn’t
quite right. Validation messages can of course be translated. They
feature unique error codes so support personnel who can’t read the
validation message a user is contacting them about because it is in a
language they can’t understand can know what it means by looking up
the error code’s meaning.
•       MatthiasS is following the testing strategy and started testing the
main screens and functionality of the partner module. He will continue
working on different aspects of testing and quality assurance and
invest some time setting up test cases to run automatically. Part of
it will be done in co-operation with the Calvin students.
•       WolfgangB has implemented both the Local Partner Data Tab and the
Family Members Tab on the Partner Edit Screen. He is now starting to
design and implement screens and functionality for extracts in the
Partner Module with the prospect of a group of students helping with
parts of this in January.
•       TimI has been working on the Accounts Payable subsystem, adding
functionality to that which already existed.
•       AlanP completed the four Maintain Table screens and has since worked
on the Local Data Labels screen for Partner and Personnel which had
some increased complexity and is almost finished now.
•       ChristopherT finished work on the processing of the Admin Fees and
moved onto Budgeting. He is converting the Budget segments of the
Petra 2.x program code into the C# programming language. Phase 1 of
this work is now completed, Phase 2 (import/export and autogenerate)
has been started.
•       JoachimM has almost finished work on the Debian Package. He had to
reduce his current involvement in order to focus on his diploma thesis
for the next few months.
•       TimotheusP merged the branch that uses the Benerator open source
software to generate random partner addresses for OpenPetra. This is
useful for testing and demonstration purposes. ThomasS has finished
his work on that branch.
•       TimotheusP made huge speed improvements to the build system, making
life much easier again for the developers.
•       TimotheusP completed the switch to .Net 4.0, both on Windows and Linux
•       TimotheusP worked on a nightly build server for OpenPetra
standalone. It now included NUnit tests and produces a Windows
standalone installer for each build. This will help a lot with
testing. You can find the latest untested build at
http://ci-win.solidcharity.com/job/OpenPetraBuildWin/
•       TimotheusP was working on support of Online Registration for ExtJS4.
Still much work to do to get the Online Backend to work with ext.net
and Mono 2.10
•       TimotheusP did work on a Linux remote developer’s machine, to offer
remote access to people interested in joining the project. Details
will follow soon!
•       Sqlite on Linux is now supported again

Thank you for your interest and support,
 WolfgangB for the OpenPetra developers

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last eleven weeks until November 09th, 2011

[Christian K. (ICT) <Chr...@om...>]

Because the recent months have been very busy we didn't find the time to write a two-monthly news update. Sorry! Here comes a delayed update on what's happened in the OpenPetra project during that time.

*         We have released OpenPetra Version 0.2.12 Alpha on September 19th, 2011. Much work has been done in the area of the Finance Module, specifically in the General Ledger sub-system. For details see http://www.openpetra.org/en/download-openpetraorg/!

*         WolfgangB decided to hand over the project management of OpenPetra to MatthiasS. This hand-over has the full support of the core development team and the International IT leadership. WolfgangB is now focussing on software development.

*         MatthiasS has set up a project plan over the last months. In his new role as project manager he continues to review and prioritise tasks in order to manage the future direction of development. He also came up with a strategy for testing that will help to ensure that OpenPetra will become high-quality software.

*         TimotheusP has merged quite a few development branches to the main development line, including the 'Donor Recipient History' functionality, which was created earlier on by MatthiasH.

*         TimotheusP has also created a CentOS package for OpenPetra. JoachimM and TimotheusP have been working together on creating a Debian package for OpenPetra (CentOS and Debian are Linux distributions).

*         ChristopherT worked on the processing of the Admin Fees when posting a Gift Batch, which is part of his continued work on the International Clearing House sub-system of the Finance Module. He is converting many segments of the Petra 2.x program code into the C# programming language. Phase 1 of this work is now completed, Phase 2 has been started.

*         TimI has recently started working on the OpenPetra system. With a background in 'back-end nuts and bolts', TimI chose as his first OpenPetra job the file import and export facilities. Some code already existed in this area, so TimI has spent several weeks 'beefing up' the source code so that it exports and imports all supported fields, and copes appropriately with all the possible error conditions. The user interface is similar to that in Petra 2.x, although the various supported file formats now use a single user interface.

*         WolfgangB has implemented both the Relationships Tab and the Subscriptions Tab in the Partner Edit screen and is now working on the Local Partner Tab, which is also a part of the central Partner Edit screen.

*         AlanP has continued to work on four more Maintain Table screens and should complete this work soon.

*         ChristianK performed an investigation into various technical solutions and their estimated efforts for various ways of implementing a major part of the Personnel Module. The conclusion was that it can be done in the way that was most preferred by OM's International Personnel staff - by implementing a 'Personnel Data' Tab Group in the Partner Edit screen that the user can simply switch to. ChristianK did the implementation, with three Individual Data screens of Petra 2.x (which use different features) already converted. Those can now be taken as a template for converting further screens.

*         ChristianK continues to be the point person for many of the technical questions that the new developers have and is continuing to improve technical documentation in our wiki.

*         Many errors in various parts of the application were fixed and the Partner Find screen got improved.

*         We had a 3-day developer meeting in Carlisle at the beginning of November. The aims were to again bring the core development team together in one place, with remote team members being present, to make decisions on a number of topics and to plan ahead for the next months. The meeting went very well, important decisions were made and we are all encouraged.

*         One of the outcomes of the meeting is that one more developer will be assigned to work on the Finance Module as soon as he has finished his current work on other things in OpenPetra. We also decided that we should approach one person to see if he would be interested in becoming a tester for OpenPetra.

"Technical bits":

*         AlanP created the 'OpenPetra Developer's Assistant', a very useful tool that raises the productivity of the software developers. It provides a graphical front-end to the otherwise commandline-centric tools that are used in the development of OpenPetra. It simplifies and speeds up many common tasks, captures and parses logfile output and makes working with several configurations and working in several branches easier.

*         AlanP investigated ways of documenting OpenPetra's database schema in a more helpful, graphical way and found a good solution for that. We really liked the outcome when he showed it to us at the developer's meeting and we asked him to go ahead with the implementation.

*         TimotheusP streamlined the source code in the Finance module. The result is cleaner and paves the way for further implementations in the Finance module. He also centralised source code that is responsible for the data transfer between the server and client parts of OpenPetra, making it easier to understand and test.

*         An effort was made to reduce the number of compiler warnings to lessen the 'noise' of the build outputs. Also, our build server got migrated from Hudson to Jenkins.

*         The Forms generator saw several improvements.

*         We can now create Solution and Project Files in the Visual Studio 2010 format (we had already support for the 2008 formats), again widening the choice of Integrated Development Environments for developers. Support for the new SharpDevelop 4.1 file formats is in the pipeline.

Thank you for your interest and support,

ChristianK for the OpenPetra developers.


________________________________
OM International Limited - Unit B Clifford Court, Cooper Way - Carlisle CA3 0JG - United Kingdom
Charity reg no: 1112655 - Company reg no: 5649412 (England and Wales)

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last eight weeks until August 22nd, 2011

[Christian K. (ICT) <Chr...@om...>]

*         We had very good and productive OpenPetra meetings in June. Topics covered: project planning, project structure, people & tasks, architecture, involvement of users. After three days of meetings we had a team building day which provided a good opportunity to get to know each other better, especially as several remote team members could join in.


*         ChristianK attended the "International Conference on Computing and Mission (ICCM)" in Indiana (iccm.org<http://www.iccm.org/>) in June.  He gave a presentation on OpenPetra, which was very well received. Several conference attendees showed strong interest in OpenPetra.


*         ChristianK was also kept busy with the training of our new developers, ChristopherT and AlanP. In addition to that he spent considerable time updating and extending our developer documentation in our wiki.


*         ChristopherT has nearly finished his work on seven  Maintain Table screens for the Finance Module and has now started working on the ICH (International Clearing House) Sub-Module of the Finance Module.


*         AlanP has been working on fourteen new Maintain Table screens for the Partner, Personnel, Finance and System Manager Modules.


*         ThomasS continued his work on the creation of pseudo-random test data and already achieved a lot with that.


*         TimotheusP has merged a few development branches to the main development line and updated one last missing piece in our toolset so we can from now on use C# language versions greater than C# 2.0. He was also present at the TeenStreet conference and used a version of OpenPetra at the conference for the purposes of late registration and the printing of badges.


*         A student from Taylor University, SethB, who came to Carlisle together with the other students earlier in the year came back to Carlisle for eight weeks to further the work which he and another student have started in January. Thanks Seth!


*         We have added experimental support for a further Integrated Development Environment (IDE), MonoDevelop (http://monodevelop.com/), a cross-platform IDE. We already have fully working support for the SharpDevelop and Visual Studio IDE's, allowing software engineers to work with their tool of choice for the development of OpenPetra.


*         We welcome a new core developer, TimI, who will join us full-time at the end of August! He will be based in Carlisle, U.K.


*         We say goodbye to core developer ThiasG. He has helped us to improve our build systems, migrated our source code repository system from git to Bazaar, helped us to create automated API documentation using doxygen and investigated improvements for our software architecture (the latter one together with ChristianK). We are missing him already and wish him all the best for the future.


Thank you for your interest and support,

ChristianK for the OpenPetra developers.

________________________________
OM International Limited - Unit B Clifford Court, Cooper Way - Carlisle CA3 0JG - United Kingdom
Charity reg no: 1112655 - Company reg no: 5649412 (England and Wales)

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last eight weeks until June 14th, 2011

[Christian K. (ICT) <Chr...@om...>]

 *   We have released OpenPetra Version 0.2.10 Alpha at the end of May 2011. Lots of new functionality has been added in this release. For details see http://www.openpetra.org/en/download-openpetraorg/!
 *   OpenPetra has been chosen by Sourceforge.net to be the 'Project of the Month' for May 2011! See http://sourceforge.net/blog/may-2011-potm-openpetra/.
 *   WolfgangU has finished his work on Month End Closing and Year End Closing (Finance Module).
 *   MatthiasH has been working on reversing and adjusting of gifts (Finance Module) and on adding and editing of Commitment Periods for staff (Personnel Module).
 *   WolfgangB has finished his work on several reports for the Personnel Module.
 *   TimotheusP has merged quite a few development branches to the main development line and built release 0.2.10 Alpha.
 *   ChristopherT, who joined us in April, has started work on several Maintain Table screens for the Finance Module.
 *   ThiasG looked into the automatic creation of API documentation (programmer's documentation) and realised this using the open source project 'Doxygen'. Find the documentation at http://codedoc.openpetra.org
 *   ChristanK and ThiasG are working on improving the architecture of OpenPetra (esp. Business Object Layer).
 *   ThomasS worked on the creation of pseudo-random test data. Such data will be used for populating test databases with lots of data. The open source project 'benerator' is used for that; it allows the creation of realistic and valid high-volume test data.
 *   The two students from Taylor University have finished their work on a framework for data entry assistants (aka 'Shepherds'), which they were working on during this spring term. They enjoyed working on OpenPetra and made good progress.
 *   JoachimM has been working on rewriting and relaunching the OpenPetra website (http://www.openpetra.org). From now on we'll only have one source code for all existing languages and the language dependent texts now come from a database. There are still some smaller changes planned for the web site.
 *   The spanish translation of the web site is complete. Thanks to everybody who contributed to that! ¡Muchas gracias!
 *   A contributor, Joergenr, started a Danish translation of OpenPetra. It is well underway.
 *   People joining and leaving the core team: We say hello to MatthiasS. He is working for four days per week, focussing on project planning and tracking. A warm welcome to AlanP, too! He is a volunteer, working on Maintain Table screens for one day per week. We say goodbye to core developers WolfgangU and MatthiasH. They both contributed a lot to the Finance Module of OpenPetra and will be missed.

Thank you for your interest and support,

ChristianK for the OpenPetra developers.



________________________________
OM International Limited - Unit B Clifford Court, Cooper Way - Carlisle CA3 0JG - United Kingdom
Charity reg no: 1112655 - Company reg no: 5649412 (England and Wales)

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the 2 months until April 14th, 2011

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

With this update we try to keep the sentences shorter, and rather include a
link to a more detailed page for those that are interested in that
particular topic.

We are sorry that it has taken us so long to write an update, but things
have been busy, which is definitely a good thing.

*The ICCM in February has been good. It would be good if there were more
people next time, otherwise it would be a shame for all the effort put in by
a number of excellent people.
*We presented OpenPetra at the Kongress Christlicher
Führungskräfte in Nürnberg, you can find a couple of pictures
here: http://bit.ly/fJbtMI; We still have to follow up several contacts.
*We are planning a cooperation with http://www.tbits.net/ who are willing to
provide the hosting for OpenPetra. This will be of great benefit for all
sizes of organisations, and will free the developers of OpenPetra of the
hosting tasks. If you are interested in this, contact Timotheus at
tim...@so.... For the technical people: See the wiki
page on http://bit.ly/fJdgLL about some issues with .net Remoting related to
this.
*Work has progressed on the online registration and especially the backend
for the registration offices. There is a blog item at
http://bit.ly/g9Cah5about how to setup Mono and Ext.Net. We have now
cleaner code-behind files.
*We have now a new sub-forum where the developers can ask finance related
questions. Thanks and Welcome to Alwyn and Simon who are helping us as
financial experts there!
*We have released Version 0.2.8 in the middle of February, but this version
is quite old again, the following things have been implemented since. So
watch out for another release soon!
*There has been an important change to the build architecture, that ThiasG
has been working on. We are still improving on that. See the blog of Thias
for more details: http://bit.ly/edqMF3
*MatthiasH has been busy on the gift system. We now have recurring gift
batches, which can eventually be used for direct debit and other regular
donations that the charity can rely upon. Matthias has also worked on
adjusting and reverting gift batches.
*WolfgangU has worked on support for foreign currencies. He is currently
working on period closing and year end closing.
*RobP has helped us on the forum and answering our questions to understand
the finance system.
*WolfgangB has worked on some reports for the personnel module.
*Joachim has got great people to work on the spanish translation, and he is
also working on the new OpenPetra website for better translation. He is
using WordPress and http://www.qianqin.de/qtranslate.
*Chris has joined OpenPetra development in the beginning of April, fulltime!
Welcome! He will be joining the work on the finance module.
*ChristianK has worked on this:
**improved unhandled Exception handling
**writing specifications for the creation of more Maintain Tables. Those
screens can be done by novice software engineers.
**Specifying tasks for the two students at Taylor University. They are
continuing with work that got started when the Taylor University students
were with OM ICT in Carlisle.
**Updating data that is used to track the progress of the openPETRA Project.
**Ongoing co-ordination with volunteers and interested educational
institutions.
**Some progress in Architecture Discussions was made.
**Work on making data validation work properly in various situations has
been started.


Thank you for your interest and support,

Timotheus for the OpenPetra developers.

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last 4 weeks until February 8th, 2011

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

   - The visit of the six students and the two members of staff from the
   Computer Science and Engineering department of Taylor University
   (Indiana/US) (http://cse.taylor.edu/) to the OM offices in Carlisle was
   very successful! They got to know quite a few aspects of the openPETRA
   development and created useful functionality, using our WinForms Generator
   to generate twelve ‘Maintain Table’ screens for a start. They then went on
   to begin development on two ‘UserControls’, which will improve the
   navigation and look-and-feel of the openPETRA main menu screen once they are
   finished. Two of the students embarked on a longer-running software
   engineering project. They will continue to work on it in university during
   the spring semester, under the tutelage of their professor. The two students
   are creating a framework for data entry assistants (aka ‘Shepherds’).
   ChristianK and WolfgangB were teaching and coaching this fantastic and
   highly motivated group and found it to be an enjoyable and rewarding
   experience!
   - ChristianK’s work on the Partner Find screen is progressing: the menus
   now have all possible menu items and they are enabled/disabled according to
   the situation (although many menu items aren’t functional yet) and a ToolBar
   has been added to the screen, the collapsible Partner Info panel on that
   screen got completed.
   ChristianK also closed a few annoying Bugs in our Grid/List View, which
   affected a lot of screens. One of the bugs could only be fixed because the
   underlying Grid Control (SourceGrid, http://sourcegrid.codeplex.com/) is
   open source and ChristianK could understand from the Grid’s source code how
   our wrapper Grid/List View Control could be fixed. That’s one of the open
   source advantages!
   - TimotheusP’s work on the online registration for a conference that OM
   Germany is hosting in the end of July is progressing well. Adjustments to
   support various languages and home office situations are done currently.
   This is a first application which demonstrates the ability to create
   good-looking web frontends for – and with – openPETRA, although openPETRA is
   mainly a desktop application which runs outside of a web browser. Demo:
   http://demo.openpetra.org:8009/ (esp. the last two links on that web
   page).
   - WolfgangU is still working on the foreign currency handling and the
   revaluation process – the basics are working now. While creating Unit Tests
   he encountered some problems with our Unit Test software, which is slowing
   down the speed of development. However, time spent on creating a better Unit
   Test infrastructure is time spent well…
   - MatthiasH has finished work on General Ledger and Gift import. This
   should soon get integrated into the main development line of openPETRA (from
   a development branch). He is now working on the Gift Edit screen, adding
   Controls that have been there in Petra 2.x, eg. confidential flag, mailing
   code etc.
   - ChristianK and MatthiasG (who are our Architecture Team) are continuing
   to lead investigations on various architectural issues and are currently
   gathering information for decisions on a few of those.
   - MatthiasG’s work on improving our NAnt scripts is progressing: he is
   working on ways that will enable us to do Builds without Project Files,
   generating code without Project Files, etc.
   - ThomasS is still working on importing generated data to establish a
   good and big demo database with ‘pseudo-random’ data.
   - JoachimM is working on restructuring the openPETRA website
   www.openpetra.org somewhat – we are incorporating several suggestions
   that came from two reviews of the website. Goals: the website should be even
   easier to navigate and the content should be better arranged. JoachimM, with
   the help of other volunteers, is also still working on the Spanish
   translation of the website.
   - WolfgangB is continuing his work on the project plan/estimation, which
   is a big undertaking for a project the size of openPETRA. Once this is
   completed, the project plan will be provisional at this stage, but it should
   give us a clearer picture and vision. It should also encourage fund raisers,
   other organisations and software developers to join and support the project.

   - TimotheusP, WolfgangU, MatthiasG and JoachimM are attending the
   “International Conference on Computing and Mission (ICCM Europe)” in the
   Netherlands (http://www.iccm-europe.org/), from Feb. 9th-Feb. 12th, 2011.
   That’s a good opportunity to meet them in person! TimotheusP is running a
   workshop themed “Using the Concepts of Development Frameworks” (
   http://www.iccm-europe.org/index.php/EU2011/Workshops). We are attending
   this conference primarily to spread the word about openPETRA and to network
   with other participants. This year there should be more software developers
   attending and we want to see in which areas we could possibly cooperate.

   - openPETRA will have a shared booth at the “Kongress christlicher
   Fuehrungskraefte”http://www.fuehrungskraeftekongress.de/ at the end of
   February 2011. You can meet TimotheusP in person there! More details: see
   last “update” below.

   - 28 Bugs got fixed since the last news update.



Thank you for your interest and your support in various ways!

ChristianK for the openPETRA developers

[Openpetraorg-weekly] First Update in 2011 looking back over the past 3 months and current projects

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

The new year 2011 has already progressed quite a bit, and it is time
to establish good routines again.
Some of you have missed the weekly updates, and I want to thank you
who have asked for regular updates.
A lot of things have happened since the last update, which was more
than 3 months ago, at the end of September 2010.
I will write a short summary later in this update.

The problem is that while busily working away, we forget to take time
to write down what has happened, and what the goals are.
For this year, which seems to be the year when the OpenPetra project
becomes really busy, we want to keep everyone up-to-date.
It might not be always a structured text, but even an informal update
can help to keep people motivated and to share the vision.
We might take writing the updates in turns, so one time you get the
update written by the developers in Germany, the other time from the
guys in Carlisle.

A short, not complete summary of things that have happened in the past 3 months:

In the middle of October, the 4 developers of SolidCharity.com,
Matthias, Thias, Wolfgang and Timotheus, have had their first
real-life meeting in Mosbach, Germany.
Since then we have established a weekly phone conference call between
us, and have all got into programming with C# and got used more or
less to the tools.

Christian has visited in October 2010 the Free Software and Open
Source Symposium at Seneca College, Toronto.
You can find his slides and the recording of his session here,
unfortunately the sound quality is quite poorly, there was a problem
with the recording equipment:
http://www.fosslc.org/drupal/content/openpetra-free-and-easy-use-administration-software-package-non-profit-organisations
Christian took away a number of good suggestions, and lots of
contacts, and we still have to see how we can make best use of those.

Some projects that we have found interesting over the last months:
* IRC: Christian was told that this is an excellent tool for
developers on an Open Source project to communicate, and we have
started using IRC, and it is really helpful! Today we have had 8
developers online at the same time, and that was not even all
developers, some were offline. You find instructions for joining the
IRC channel on the website:
http://www.openpetra.org/index.php?lang=en&page=community-irc
* http://bigbluebutton.org/ for free voice conferencing, especially
helpful because we are working as a distributed team. We have not used
this software yet, though.
* http://www.mikogo.com/ this is a freeware tool for easy-to-use
cross-platform desktop sharing, we have found this very useful to help
new developers getting started, and have another pair of eyes to look
at strange bugs
* Greenhopper, Jira, Confluence: the tools from Atlassian for work
item tracking and wiki and agile work flows: we have had a brief look,
but at the moment we will continue with Mantis and MediaWiki hosted
with Sourceforge.
* We looked at git, and realised that the git setup we have had with
sourceforge was quite difficult to maintain and to adjust to our
workflows. Therefore we decided to look into alternatives, which
basically were mercurial and bazaar.

In the week after the first of Advent, which was in the end of
November and the beginning of December, 3 of the SolidCharity
developers travelled to Carlisle, UK, to meet the 4 developers who are
working with OM on Petra and OpenPetra. We also met the managers who
are actually responsible for spending money (that has been donated to
OM) on the development of OpenPetra. We are thankful that we had a
safe journey despite the snowy weather and quite a few delays on the
planes and trains. The meetings were good, there was a good
understanding of the common goals.
Major results were:
* We have realized that OpenPetra will be the tool of first choice for
growing and emerging mission movements from the "Global South". Global
South describes the part of the world that used to be the countries
receiving help and training for many decades, but where the church has
grown hugely over the last years, and should now be treated as an
equal partner in world missions.
* We now have an architecture board, with Thias and Christian, who
will delegate the investigation of topics to other team members, and
who will make technical decisions. In the end we want to have open
discussions, but it is also good when there is some structure in the
project.
* We have asked OM to provide us with a Product owner, ie. a person
that is full-time available to the OpenPetra project, and talks to
users and developers, so that the software will fit the needs of the
actual users. We as developers don't want to make decisions for the
users, and we cannot do all the interviews and negotiations.
* We have decided to switch from git to bazaar, and host that on our
own server. Bazaar supports a more centralized workflow, while still
allowing distributed development. Bazaar also is more restrictive than
git, which protects us from possibly breaking the history of a branch.
We wanted to get this done before the Taylor students would come in
the first days of January 2011, and with hindsight this was probably a
far too hasty switch. Anyway, we have worked hard on this project over
the past weeks, have written documentation in the wiki, and are still
learning our lessons.
* The other big topic was the project plan. The team in Carlisle had
worked over the months of autumn on the categorizing of the old 4GL
source code, and assigned levels of difficulty for each file. During
our meetings, we assigned time estimations to each level, which
allowed us to do a more appropriate estimation of the overall size of
the project, of things that still need to be done on OpenPetra until
it becomes an option to replace the old Petra. We also talked about
having a smaller version of OpenPetra, which would work already for
smaller offices inside and outside of OM, eg. offices that just do
bookkeeping, but don't use OpenPetra for personnel management. We have
not got a final project plan yet, but WolfgangB is working on that.
The project plan will not be set in stone, but should give us a
clearer picture and vision, which should encourage fund raisers and
other organisations and developers to join and support the project.

In the first days of January 2011, a group of 6 students with 2
members of staff of the Taylor university have travelled from the US
to the UK, to visit the OM offices in Carlisle, to get to know
missions and how their IT skills can be used in missions, and to help
with OpenPetra development. You can read an article about the visit
and with some photos of the team here:
http://www.taylor.edu/experience/stories/england.shtml
Read their daily updates on the blog of the trip: http://cmc.taylor.edu/

Over the last weeks, more volunteers have started looking into
OpenPetra, to see if they want to get involved. This is encouraging
for us, and we try our best to help with setting up the development
environment, even offering a remote Windows machines free of charge
which are really fast compiling and prevent people from needing to
install SharpDevelop and other tools on their own (slow) computer.
I am sorry that we are sometimes slow to answer emails. The best is to
write in the forum, and not personal emails to me. Talking to us on
the IRC channel is also a good way to get answers quite quickly.

Joachim, one of the first external volunteers, has worked hard with
the help of native spanish speakers on the spanish translation of the
OpenPetra client and the website. You soon will see the spanish
version of the OpenPetra website. This shows how OpenPetra will be
available in all sorts of languages and cultures, depending on the
volunteers that see a benefit in OpenPetra for their favourite people
group.

On the production side, DFN UK are using the centrally hosted version
of OpenPetra for managing their addresses, and they are looking
forward to do bookkeeping as well with OpenPetra. They found a number
of bugs when creating new partners, but were able to work around those
issues.
The annual gift receipts for the german Nazareth charity have been
printed again with OpenPetra. We discovered a number of bugs, some of
those have been resolved already.
Erich in the Ukraine is evaluating OpenPetra to be used as accounting
software for the charity he works for, and we are still working on
getting the import for finance data to work for him.

Projects we are currently working on (I probably have forgotten some projects):
* The Taylor students are working on better navigation controls for
the main screen, collapsible panels, and a framework for assistants
aka shepherds.
* MatthiasH is working on GL and Gift export and import
* WolfgangU is working on foreign currency accounts and foreign
currency transactions.
* MatthiasG is working on improving our NAnt scripts to generate csproj files.
* TimotheusP has to work on high priority on the online registration
for a conference that OM Germany are hosting in the end of July, and
people would like to register already now! This will utilize ext.js
and ext.net in combination with OpenPetra. You can find a demo here:
http://demo.openpetra.org:8009/
* JoachimM continues to work on the spanish translation of the
website, and also taking on smaller bugs developing in C#.
* ThomasS is working on importing generated data to establish a good
and big demo database, which we will be able to use for performance
testing and developing reports.
* ChristianK is working with the students, and will also continue to
improve the Partner Edit and Partner Find screens.
* WolfgangB is working on the project plan and still has other
responsibilties outside of OpenPetra.
* We have also got a good review of 2 people of our website, with
suggestions to improve the structure and presentation of information
for easy reading and getting to the pages people are looking for. We
need to find time to apply some of these suggestions.

Events for the coming months:
* A number of developers of software applications similar to OpenPetra
will meet at the International Conference on Computing and Mission
(ICCM) http://www.iccm-europe.org/ in February 2011. We hope to get to
know each other, recognize our common goals and different focuses, and
we will see where we can cooperate and how we can encourage each
other.
* In the end of February 2011 there is a meeting of christian business
people in Germany, http://www.fuehrungskraeftekongress.de/. Together
with the http://www.citar.de/ project we will have a booth there, and
hope to establish good contacts to business people who understand the
technical challenges that OpenPetra aims to address, and who might be
able to participate in the effort in one way or the other. We also
will meet representatives from charities and non-government
organisations, that might see the potential of OpenPetra.

As you see, the past 3 months have been very busy and very exciting.
It seems, this year 2011 will become quite interesting, and I cannot
estimate at the moment where we will be at the end of the year.
We need all the help we can get, since this task is huge, and even
when we try our best, we lack experience and resources, and we aim far
higher than we could humanly speaking get to.

Thank you all for your support!

I hope the next update will not be too far away, and it will be of
course be a little shorter, but who knows, if things get rolling...

All the best to you for 2011,
  Timotheus for the OpenPetra developers

[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.

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last 2 weeks until August 21th

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

== What happened in the past 2 weeks ==
* Bernd has finished porting the conference reports from the old Petra
to OpenPetra!
* Matthias has continued work on the GL screen, you can now cancel
journals and delete transactions if they have not been posted yet.
* Timotheus has added functionality to the GL screen to import GL
batches from text file (CSV). This supports the format of the text
files used for Petra 2.x
* GL Batches are only downloaded from the server depending on the
current filter setting in the GL Batches screen. This should prevent
the situation that all batches are downloaded over a slow connection.
* Timotheus has created a nant task called generateWebforms: with
internationalisation, and validation. It currently supports Text
boxes, date time picker, checkboxes and radio buttons, and group
boxes. Sending data to the server is generated as well. This is no
replacement (yet) for fully functional screens similar to the fat
client, but should help with simple forms that can be used in the
browser.
* The forms generator has been tidied up a bit while adding the
webforms generator to the winforms generator.
* We have cleaned up the Finance dlls, both on server and client: eg
Ict.Petra.Client.MFinance.Gui.dll has now been split into one assembly
for each AP, Gift, GL, and Common.
* Effort on the translations has been ongoing. Welcome to Joachim who
has volunteered to help with the Spanish translation!

== What did not happen in that time ==
* The tutorial has not been finished yet, especially the Finance
module is not documented at all yet.

== What should happen in the next weeks ==
* See the TODO list from the last update. Most issues still apply.
* Bernd will work on more finance reports to be ported to OpenPetra.
* We also want to add more unit tests and integration tests, even for
the client, probably using NUnitForms
(http://nunitforms.sourceforge.net/).

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last 2 weeks until August 7th

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

Update for the last 2 weeks until August 7th

== What happened in the past 2 weeks</strong></h3>
* Bernd added more reports. He is working on the conference reports at
the moment. At the moment this data cannot be tested yet with free
demo data, and there is no conference module yet anyways. He is
testing against an OM internal database. But Bernd hopes to finish
implementing all reports by the end of October, which is great!
* Christian worked on improving the controls. For example the
numeric-only textbox makes sure that only numbers or decimals are
entered. Some of the maintenance screens are already using the
controls.
* Johan was available to us for a couple of days, and he helped with
one of the maintenance screens.
* Hans started to help with the maintenance screens as well, and did a
couple of them already on his first day! He will be helping a couple
of days each week during the summer.
* We are now using a proper algorithm (Longest Common Subsequence) for
merging generated files. This means there are no "out-of-sync"
problems anymore for manualcode sections, which happened quite often
in the autogeneration of the instantiators with nant generateGlue, and
has a stabilising effect on all generation of code.
* The caching of data is now generated with nant
generateORMCachedTables. This allowed us to quickly add the cached
tables for the Personnel module, since we needed the cached tables
there for the maintenance screens. It took us too long to manually
write the cached table functions, and it was repetitive work anyways.
* We are now using the PDFSharp library (http://www.pdfsharp.net/) for
printing form letters directly to PDF files. This allows us to send
email confirmations with attached PDF files, which will be needed for
the "Online Application Form" tool that OM Germany have requested.
This tool can be used for applications for conferences, but also for
job applicants who will enter their own data and this saves our
Personnel department from entering all the data manually.
* Timotheus has worked on some web interface for OpenPetra which works
with any web browser. We want to use it for the application form tool.
We are using the Ext.js AJAX framework
(http://www.sencha.com/products/js/).
* Matthias from Erlangen worked on the GL Batch screen. You can now
cancel batches, and filter for batches ready for posting, or batches
that are already posted, or you can display all batches.
* Matthias from Mosbach is helping with the translation of OpenPetra
into German. We still are not sure though how to adjust the screens so
that the longer texts fit, since german texts usually take more space
than the english words.
* We have added some documentation on the wiki about how to submit
patches, using http://github.com. Have a look at
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/openpetraorg/index.php?title=Submitting_patches_and_features
* Timotheus met with Matthias from Gie&szlig;en, to discuss about
joining the development team. Matthias will be a great help with
establishing good IT development processes since he has a lot of
experience with Configuration Management. Unit tests, and other tools
and processes, would increase the quality of OpenPetra and save us and
the users a lot of headaches...

== What did not happen in that time</strong></h3>
* The tutorial has not been finished yet, especially the Finance
module is not documented at all yet.

== What should happen in the next weeks</strong></h3>
* Add more details to the tutorial. Provide a demo database with
extensive sample data for quick user experience.
* Matthias and Timotheus will continue working on the accounting part
of OpenPetra, especially to finish the GL screen and add functionality
for extended posting, eg. with analysis attributes or multi-currency
operations.
* We also need to improve the speed of the GL batch screen, using
paged loading of the batches.
* Hans in Carlisle and Isabel in Germany will work on more maintenance
screens, mainly for the personnel module.
* Bernd will add more conference reports.
* Timotheus will work on exporting of partners with all their data and
import into another database, which will be needed for the "Online
Application form": We can have one OpenPetra system on the web server,
and another one locally in the office.
* We might spend time on documenting and refactoring the Winforms
generator, and also extend the GUI generator to also generate ext.js
screens.
* Other members of the Petra/OpenPetra team will spend time at home
with family and supporters, and therefore will not be available to
OpenPetra for a number of weeks.

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last 9 weeks until the last week of July

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

== What happened in the past weeks ==
* The Forms Generator has seen many improvements. Quite a few of those
improvements again show the power of the Generator to generate very
complex screen layouts and the ability to even produce supporting code
that is needed in complex screens which load data dynamically or which
change dynamically at runtime (that happens on the Partner Edit
screen).

* The Forms Generator now supports the rather easy creation of
so-called 'Maintain Table Screens'. Those screens maintain the values
of the many lookup tables and some system setup tables. Such screens
can now be done by people who have a somewhat technical mindset and
good PC skills, but who are *not* programmers. This considerably
widens the audience of people who can help us in doing many of the 105
screens.

* A volunteer, Isabel from Germany, added eleven simple 'Maintain
Table Screens' to openPETRA in less than three days. She had no
previous experience of openPETRA and doesn't know the C# language!

* The Partner Edit screen has seen quite a few improvements. Most
notably the 'Partner Details' Tab is now displaying different data
according to the Partner's Partner Class - and most of the program
code for that is auto-generated. Several bugs were fixed as well.

* New Reports got added: nine for the Partner Module and sixteen for
the Personnel Module.

* openPETRA now has its own logo (see top-left corner of the
openpetra.org web site)! The application got changed to use the new
logo. There are also 2 new flyers available on the website, inviting
people and organisations to join the OpenPetra project.

* We have released the first Alpha version in the middle of June. This
included the new generated Partner Edit screen, and also improved
encryption with public/private keys.

* We presented OpenPetra in a remote session to participants of the <a
href="http://www.iccm.org/">ICCM conference</a> in the US in the
middle of June, and got good feedback.

* We have started working on a tutorial which should show people
quickly how they can use OpenPetra. We are also working on generating
demo data to be able to create realistic scenarios for testing and
demonstration. We are already able to create a number of random
partners with addresses.

* Timotheus has started his own company (<a
href="http://www.solidcrp.com">http://www.solidcrp.com</a>) which
offers development services to OM and other organisations. Soon we
want to offer hosting services as well. Matthias is the first employee
of that company, and we are looking for more people to work for this
company. This is good for OpenPetra, because people can either work
voluntarily on OpenPetra, or they can join OM, or they can start
working for Timotheus for a fair payment.

== What did not happen in that time ==
* The tutorial has not been finished yet, especially the Finance
module is not documented at all yet.



== What should happen in the next weeks ==
* Add more details to the tutorial. Provide a demo database with
extensive sample data for quick user experience.

* Matthias and Timotheus will focus on the accounting part of
OpenPetra, especially to finish the GL screen and add functionality
for extended posting, eg. with analysis attributes or multi-currency
operations.

* Bernd will return to Germany and will be based in the same office as
Timotheus for three months, which will be good. Bernd will use his
remaining time with OM to continue to work on the reports for
OpenPetra.

* Other members of the Petra/OpenPetra team will spend time at home
with family and supporters, and therefore will not be available to
OpenPetra for a number of weeks.

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last 8 weeks until the middle of May

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

== What happened in the past weeks ==
* There have been organisational changes in the team.
Timotheus is now working independent from ICT, but still heading up
the OpenPetra effort.
Christian and Bernd from the Petra Team have now joined the OpenPetra
development. They work for ICT on OpenPetra.
* There has been the preview release 0.0.14 in the beginning of April.
The bank import screen now supports split gifts, and contains now the
plugin for the MT940 files provided by german banks.
* Christian and Timotheus have worked on the Winforms Generation, and
fixed some bugs and added lots of features.
New Features for Winforms generation are for example: better
possibilities to layout the screen, and automatic data binding to
different fields from several tables in a dataset on one screen.
The goal is to generate the Partner Edit screen, which is a quite
complex screen, and is still manually created in the current release
which is hard to maintain.
* Christian is working on analysing the Petra 2.x code written in 4GL
to see how much work needs to be done to get all code converted to C#
and to OpenPetra.
* Bernd moved a number of reports from Petra 2.x to OpenPetra, which
he had already written using our own XML definition for reports.
He has also worked on the generated screens for the report parameters,
and has added user controls for sorting the columns and selecting
which columns to display.
* Timotheus has visited the British office of OM and worked on a
nightly data conversion from Petra 2.x to OpenPetra,
in order for them to be able to run SQL queries against PostgreSQL
which is much more stable than the old 4GL database,
and they now can login with the OpenPetra client to their own database!
* Timotheus is working for the German office on a partner import
screen which allows to detect existing partners and addresses.
The goal is that this import can be extended to import many data
items, eg. which are entered on a secure website by new people who
register for job applications etc.
* The Navigation menu is now able to detect all available ledgers and
to display menu items for them. It is now also possible to create new
ledgers from the client. These changes are only available through git,
there is no new release yet.
* There is now auto generated code for submitting changed datasets to
the database, which will deal with the right table order of committing
new rows to the database or deleting rows from the database, and will
also care about populating tables with new sequence values, and
updating tables that depend on those values.
This reduces the risk of programmer errors, and makes the code much
easier to read.
* Continuous Integration with CruiseControl.net: Due to several people
now committing code to the git repository, it is now good to have an
hourly automated build to check if anything broke in the code by the
last commit.
We have implemented this on a Debian server running with Mono. Thanks
go to Martin, the brother-in-law of Timotheus, who sponsors that
server!
See Timotheus' blog about minor issues with the installation of Cruise
Control.net with Mono:
http://tpokorra.blogspot.com/2010/05/cruisecontrolnet-and-mono.html
* In the past days, Timotheus has worked on the 2009 financial data
for the Nazareth charity, to post all donations and expenses
correctly. This has helped to find a number of bugs, and also shown
that some of the core financial reports are not up to scratch yet.
* We are working on recruiting new developers for OpenPetra, but it is
not easy, and many things are unclear. We are thinking into many
different directions, trying to make things possible.
* ICT is working on 2 flyers which promote OpenPetra to recruit new
developers and to invite other organisations to join the effort. There
even will be a new OpenPetra logo!

== What did not happen in that time ==
* Well, we should have sent out a report much earlier...
* There is still no somewhat stable release that we could call version 0.1.

== What should happen in the next weeks ==
* We are aiming for a first version 0.1, which should be somewhat
reliable. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of work to do.
* We need to implement access permissions based on user permissions,
eg. to make sure that only members of the finance department can see
the actual financial data.
* We would like to replace the Partner Edit screen with our generated
screen. It would be good to add the tab page for managing
subscriptions of the donors
to the Partner Edit screen as well.
* For a hosted version, we need to implement encryption based on a
Public/Private Key Pair, rather than the current symmetric encryption
which we currently have.

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last 4 weeks until the middle of March

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

== What happened in the past weeks ==
* Several smaller improvements to OpenPetra, version 0.0.13 has been released
* The build system on Linux now uses the xbuild tool and does not
depend on the monodevelop mdtool anymore.
* We participated at a meeting of IT people working with charities in
Germany, and at the ICCM Europe meeting in the Netherlands. This was
encouraging and showed that there is actually a need for an
alternative administration software.
* The PDF describing the OpenPetra project has been updated, thanks to
the guys in Carlisle. See <a
href="http://www.openpetra.org/pdf/Openpetra_Flyer_english_March2010.pdf">http://www.openpetra.org/pdf/Openpetra_Flyer_english_March2010.pdf</a>
* The translation of the OpenPetra client is now on the Launchpad
website. This is easier to use and to manage than the previous Pootle
installation. Have a look at <a
href="https://translations.launchpad.net/openpetraorg">https://translations.launchpad.net/openpetraorg</a>.
* There is a new article on the personal blog of Timotheus,
introducing the idea of <a
href="http://tpokorra.blogspot.com/2010/02/charity-resource-planning-crp-and-erp.html">Charity
Resource Planning</a>. The point is that charities have different
needs than enterprises, and the software should be written with that
in mind.

== What did not happen in that time ==
* Not much time was spent on developing and improving entering and
posting of GL and gifts.

== What should happen in the next weeks ==
* We need to improve the financial functions so that we will be able
to give financial reports for 2009 to the Nazareth Charity at their
meeting a week after Easter.
* With Christian now joining the OpenPetra development full-time, we
will merge some fixes from the old Petra 2.x into the OpenPetra code,
and perhaps start on cleaning up the Partner Edit and Partner Find
screens to get them fully functional again.

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last 4 weeks until the middle of February

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

== What happened in the past weeks ==
* Vista Support has been added to the Remote Client installer and the patchtool.
* The first production annual gift receipts have been printed for a
little charity, using OpenPetra. This means gift matching and letter
printing is now part of OpenPetra.
* OpenPetra now works with the popular MySQL database as well as it
did already with PostgreSQL and SQLite.
* Migration between databases is now easily possible, by exporting all
data to a text file, and importing again. This works across different
database types. So that means you can start experimenting with your
standalone version of OpenPetra with the default SQLite installation,
and when you need it, you can subscribe to a hosted OpenPetra solution
(using PostgreSQL or MySQL) and upload your existing data, and it will
work the other way round as well, of course.
* Ongoing discussions with OM about the future and direction of
OpenPetra are still ongoing and taking time.
* Much time was spent on another project with the local office, which
is still with the old 4GL code.
* Please have a look at the article on the personal blog of Timotheus
covering the topic of "A look at charities and Open Source ERP
software" (http://tpokorra.blogspot.com/2010/02/look-at-charities-and-open-source-erp.html).
It also includes a number of interesting links to other websites.
* The twelfth Preview of OpenPetra has just been released.

== What did not happen in that time ==
* Well, the end of the original project time is drawing near, and the
project is nowhere near we originally wanted it to be. We cannot even
release a version 0.1 with good confidence.

== What should happen in the next weeks ==
* Release version 0.1 to bring the past 12 months to a good closure.
* Discussions with OM about the future and direction of the project.
We are looking for other sponsors of the project or another way of
income to sponsor the development of OpenPetra.
* Prepare in some way for the ICCM in the Netherlands in March, which
Christian and Timotheus will visit.
* Improve the documentation of the website and in the wiki, provide
and properly present a list of things that currently work and which
things should be implemented in the near future.

[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update for the last 4 weeks until the middle of January

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

== What happened in the past weeks ==
* Work has continued on making OpenPetra run in a productive
environment, even though not much functionality is there yet.
* We now have a setup of a server that provides OpenPetra hosting. For
backup we ended up using duplicity and Amazon S3, which proved to be
the easiest and cheapest solution. All data is GPG encrypted before it
is uploaded to S3.
* The patchtool has been integrated into OpenPetra and tested. This
allows easy upgrade of clients. The patchtool has not been implemented
yet for the standalone version.
* In our specific installation, we have an encrypted communication
with a phpBB installation for authenticating the users. In the same
way, a plugin DLL for authenticating against LDAP could be
implemented.
* Version 0.0.11 has been released. Most of the new changes though
don't affect the standalone version, but the remote network setup.
* We don't publish the remote client any longer, since it is easy to
build from the sources anyways. The setup of OpenPetra on a network or
the Internet requires some configuration. If you need any help, or
would like to test our SaaS solution, let us know.
== What did not happen in that time ==
* Gift matching and letter printing is still not available in the
normal OpenPetra Client.
== What should happen next week ==
* Gift import and matching, and printing yearly gift receipts for donors.
== Projects to get involved with the project ==
* Develop an LDAP authentication plugin for OpenPetra.