FYI OpenPetra.org

[Marc Paré]

Hi Timotheus,

Many thanks for your wonderful response and for also monitoring this list.

I am hopeful that the OpenPetra project will get more attention from 
devs who may be interested in the helping out. It does look like quite a 
promising project.

I am not sure how others on this list would feel about perhaps 
revisiting the choice of direction for the npo-accounting project. But 
considering the fact that it seems to have stalled, perhaps a change of 
focus would give it new life.

I will keep monitoring the site as I am interested in seeing how the 
project will develop iin the coming months.

And yes, a linux solution, or, at least a solution where all platforms 
could be served with some form of compatible clients would be a welcomed 
decision.

Cheers,

Marc

Le 2015-05-08 01:53, Timotheus Pokorra a écrit :
> Hello Marc,
>
> Thank you for bringing up OpenPetra again!
>
> During the evaluation, OpenPetra was considered:
> http://npoacct.sfconservancy.org/ExistingProjects/OpenPetra/
>
> Since the evaluation, some things have changed:
> We have split the project, in a friendly fork [1].
> This means the guys at OM (Operation Mobilisation) can focus on
> getting the version ready for production inhouse. They plan to rollout
> OpenPetra into production for the first office within the next 3
> months. They are currently about 7 developers working on it.
> The good thing is, we have an agreement that I as representative of
> the Open Source fork have access to their internal code repository and
> usually once a month pick the code that is of interest to the general
> public and import it into the open source fork. On the Open Source
> Fork side, we can move faster and integrate technical improvements
> without so much discussion.
>
> Some improvements:
> We use now Github, rather than Bazaar/Launchpad. Makes life so much easier. [2]
> The communication between server and client has been replaced, not
> using .Net remoting anymore which has been deprecated even by
> Microsoft, but using standard http/https web services. This improves
> debugging and again makes life so much easier.
>
> I understand that the Linux client is a requirement for the Software
> Freedom Conservancy, and I do see the need as well.
> I worked on an alternative web client in the beginning of 2014. You
> can try a demo at [3].
> It is currently only a proof of concept.
> This work could be picked up and continued. Long-term, I think it is
> worth investing into a HTML/JS client rather than a fat client, which
> has to be supported on Linux, Windows, and OSX.
>
> In the past months, my focus has been on working on a Beta release of
> OpenPetra with the fat client, since the work on the browser client
> would still take a huge effort.
> I also worked on getting recent versions of Mono into Fedora with the
> long-term goal CentOS [4].
> Other people are working to fix Winform bugs for Mono, as I see in the
> Mono pull requests at Github.
> So we could make an effort to improve the OpenPetra Linux client
> running with Mono winforms.
>
> We have now a forum based on Discourse at [5].
> Unfortunately, in the past months I was not able to invest more time
> to build a community for OpenPetra.
> I see the immediate need to work towards a Beta of OpenPetra, and
> documenting what works and how it can be used to manage a small
> charity at first.
> My plan is to write tutorials for users and developers and produce
> some screencasts.
>
> Indeed, the OpenPetra project could need some more help :)
>
> Hope this helps to clarify things,
>    Timotheus
>
> [1] https://www.openpetra.org/update-december-2014-work-of-past-months-and-friendly-fork
> [2] https://github.com/openpetra/openpetra
> [3] https://demo.solidcharity.com
> [4] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/mono/2015-April/thread.html
> [5] https://forum.openpetra.org/
>
> On 7 May 2015 at 22:18, Marc Paré <marc at marcpare.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I just thought I would send you this information of another opensource fund
>> accounting project that has already been started. It is called the
>> "OpenPetra Project" and is licensed under the GPL licence.
>>
>> I wonder, seeing as our present endeavour has pretty well slowed to a crawl,
>> would it be in our interest to take a look at the OpenPetra project  and add
>> our efforts to that project, or even adopt a fork of that project? It looks
>> like the closed sourced version "Petra" is already being used by a group
>> called "Open Mobilisation" and in over 80 countries.
>>
>> At this point, the OpenPetra Project is still in alpha stage and it looks
>> like it would need a little help to get it to the level that we would most
>> likely need for what we would consider a proper "Fund Accounting" software
>> package.
>>
>> Would this be a possible new direction that we could explore?
>>
>> Also FYI, I am not a dev, so I would not be able to gauge as to how much
>> work would be involved to help more the OpenPetra project to a more stable
>> Fund Accounting level of software. But, to me, the project looks promising.
>> The code is there and already at an advanced stage, the user GUI looks also
>> quite good.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Marc
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> Wiki URL: http://npoacct.sfconservancy.org/


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