It is not my intention to enter into boring technical details, but think it is necessary a brief explanation. When you log into the application, it performs some checks for recurring invoices. These verifications are associated with other checks in the customers table that should have no effect in normal conditions.

Each customer is associated with an internal name that is generated from its own name. The programming associated with that task has not changed, but behaves differently in PHP5.2 and PHP 5.3: before accented vowels were removed, now they are replaced by non-accented vowels. Therefore, a customer whose name is “Fundación ABC” (“ABC Foundation”), in PHP 5.2 had an internal name such as “fundacinabc” but in PHP 5.3, the generated internal name is “fundacionabc”. As the internal name is used to decide if we create a new customer object, it is possible that a customer created in the old environment appear as nonexistent in the new environment, and the application will try to create it again as a new customer, producing the error.

Well, at the end it has not been such a short explanation.

Solution

If your customers do not have names with accented vowels or non US characters you probably will have no problem. If you get that error you can do one of these things:

1. If you installed from a package downloaded from the web or you installed through subversion and you are in a tag (RELEASE_0_3_…), apply this patch.
2. If you use subversion and you are in /trunk just update.
3. Wait to 0.4 version.

In UNIX system you can apply the patch (assuming you copied and uncompressed it to the root of your install) doing:

cd /path/to/siwapp
patch -p0 -i rebuildSlugsTask.diff

It will patch a file and create another one.

In windows you can try reading this and this first. However, an expert in Windows can leave a more precise instructions in the comments.

Execute the task

The patch added a task that must be executed in command line:

php symfony siwapp:rebuild-slugs

It will rebuild the internal names for all your customers and report the number of customers modified.

Thats all!

The problem is that in MySQL 5.0, although the user has full permissions on her database, she can not create or run triggers on its database. The triggers execute permission is global to the system and no database administrator would agree to grant it.

Therefore, the minimum version of MySQL where this functionality is feasible is MySQL 5.1.6. For technical information you can consult the MySQL documentation.

Please remember to check again the specifications of your web hosting to make sure you install siwapp correctly.

Today I would like to announce the use of Twig, a template system redesigned by Fabien Potencier and based on the original code by Armin Ronacher. It is a robust, fast and flexible system that will make very easy the task of creating templates for invoices and any printable item in the application.

Templates will be stored in the database so you will can edit them directly from the application. We will try to make all the process as easy and flexible as we can.

I know that templates management was working in some cases, but the code is not mature enough to leave it in its current state. We will refine it for the 0.3.

However, if you want to keep it working as before, you can re-activate it by removing the first two lines of the function executeTemplates (function is in line 159, approximately) in the /apps/siwapp/modules/configuration/actions/actions.class.php file. I would not recommend it.

I have uploaded a .zip file with the “default” printing template packed as an external template. Only for the curious.

We are working on 0.3 internals. The main changes:

• The entire data management layer is replaced with Doctrine in order to simplify the application.
• A more flexible template management system.
• More bugs .
• More bug fixes.

One caveat: the data model can vary, and indeed it does. Therefore, I remember that we are in an alpha stage and that in future versions we may regret anything developed, throw it away and start again. No one throw rocks, please .

- Remember, If you don’t know what are you doing, please, don’t press the big red button…
- This butt…? (click)

See you soon…

In short, this means that if you are not a geek and you are not familiar with the world of PHP development, it’s better for you to only test the application demo. In the near future we will develop an installation process similar to WordPress install script but, as I commented before with one person who had spent its precious time testing the app, we can not start the cart before the horse.

If anyway you want to install the app, we will still be here to get your feedback. Good night and good luck (or something similar).

Recently I came across Tripoli, a CSS library that resets the browser styles and separates layout (1em = 10px) and typography (all HTML inside the “content” container will have a base font size of 12px). It also provides some plugins to accomplish similar results as with YUI grids (but we don’t need it for the moment) and to enhance the visual appearance of base HTML for the “content” items (form controls, headers, paragraphs…).

I hope soon to have the results of this experiment and that it represents a reasonable improvement in the page rendering quality  and in the ability to customize it using themes.

Note of the author: There will surely be some mistake in my English, I wrote this the best I could.

The main features that can be seen in this version are:

• Dashboard: the place where you start when you log into the application; it shows you the most recent invoices and their status.
• Payments management: You can add payments to any opened invoice to keep track of its payment status. When you have received payments for the total amount of an invoice its status will be set to closed (fully paid) automatically.
• Invoice creation: of course. You can set an invoice as draft until finished editing it, so that it is not part of the overall calculations of the system until it is specified so. Also, you can set a discount for an invoice item (a product/service), or different taxes (VAT, spanish IVA, …) for different kind of items.
• Invoicing series: Different series can be configured to separate different kind of invoices. If you want a series for your Internet products and another for your Graphic Design services, you can configure two different prefixes (virtually unlimited, really). You could configure, for example, one invoicing series for your Internet Services for one year, and add another one for the next year in the global settings page.
• Search: There are many ways in which we can improve the search with respect to invoices. We are working on it. Currently allows text search in the major fields of invoices, as well as in the invoice item descriptions. You can also filter results by date range, a basic tag system, the invoice status… You search parameters will be remembered until the next search.
• Printable invoices: although it is not fully operational, siwapp has a templating system to allow you to install your own HTML invoice templates. This will provide both the ability of printing invoices directly from the browser, such as generating a PDF file to send by email. It is also possible to send invoices by email.
• Recurring invoices: several invoices need to be created on a periodic basis. With the recurring invoices you can edit an “invoice template” just like you edit & create a regular invoice. Then the system will automatically generate invoices according to the pattern defined by the recurring invoice. And it will do that following the schedule you set for it; every two monhts, once a year, every monday …

In conclusion I have to point out two things. The first is that I have to warn you that testing the application (in its current state) in Internet Explorer can be highly damaging to your mental health (as much as for us to develop for that browser). The second is that any suggestion is welcome, either to improve existing features, or to warn of the existence of errors (I’m sure there are many).

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