We’ll fix it in future releases. Thank you Andrej!

As you all know, we’ve been developing siwapp for the last years using the symfony 1.4 framework. When we started this project, we did it for a handful of reasons:

• have some fun
• give something back to the “community” (I know it’s not a big “something” , but still it’s something )
• learn , learn, learn.
• and , of course, all the unexpected that comes when you develop in an open environment, with all the users input and contributions.

When planned next siwapp release to be made with the symfony2 framework, we expected to continue learning and of course improving the app. The thing is: we’re struggling a little too much with this. We feel that in symfony 2 it takes too much to put a medium-weight software project up and running. Personally, I’ve learnt a lot about academic programming techniques when working with doctrine2, trying to implement all the models code we had with doctrine1.2, and I’ve enjoyed it, but still the process was being slow.

We already don’t have much time to put into siwapp because of our paying work, so it’s crucial for us to be able to develop quickly. Symfony 2 has gotten too complicated for that. It’s a great framework and this “symfony reloaded” version was meant to be well formed from every possible angle, but it’s not as agile as it used to be.

We also felt we weren’t gaining too much knowledge with it, and as I told you before, this is one of the hard core reasons we started the project in the first place for.

We’ve been playing around with django and node for other projects, and have come to have some training on that, but Ruby on Rails we never had the chance to put our hands on it. On the other hand, there’s a lot of buzz about how quick and easy is to develop in it , so we’ve decided we’re going for it!

The king is dead. Long live the king.

Which are the consequences?

• on the user side: obviously, the app will maintain the same look&feel, no worries about that.
• on the user side: if you happened to have some knowledge of php that allowed you to tweak siwapp in any way, well, for the next version , those of you who are familiar with ruby will have that chance.
• on the developer side: siwapp developers (julian, alex, and a lot more), thank you for your past contributions that of course will remain there, and please join us with the new approach . If you happen to have spend time working for the symfony2 version, well, apologies.
• on everyone’s side: a few months have been lost.

What are we going to do about it?

• we’ll keep exactly the same support in our forums for both the old and new versions of siwapp
• also, when time is right, provide a way to migrate data from the old framework to the new one
• If any of you have a patch or an enhancement for the old version, it shall be welcomed

Please keep in touch! you’ll be hearing from siwapp soon.

Keeping an eye on the users group has allowed us to quickly catch on some bugs. Fresh update for you to enjoy:

• Estimates needing to be saved three times bug corrected
• The default fonts are lighter than previous, also a wiki section on that topic updated.
• some minor template glitchs corrected
• error when deleting invoices corrected
• error 500 when deleting customer fixed
• added hungarian translation
• customer name in cyrillic error corrected.

That’s pretty much it!! You the “usual suspects” know the drill. If you’re new, we’ve got a drill for you too…

So, go on, get your stuff and head for new year’s eve celebration afterwards. I wish you a lot of using the app for the next year, 

Happy new year to everyone, btw.

For a complete view of changes done, visit this link.

The big changes are:

• Estimates
• Products
• Bug fixes
• Minor improvements

If you are upgrading, be sure to follow the instructions. Enjoy!

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!

I just tested the translation file and voila!!! the ui changed completely in a delicious way for my iso-8851-1 eyes.

What can I say?? I’m fairly proud of having siwapp running on this ancient language.

Siwapp 0.4 is around the corner. The software is ready for being published, but before we release it, we need to make our traditional “call for translators”. And ask for your gentle help in translating this app.

So, If you’re listening, please throw us a comment!!

In fact, this whole thing started thanks to Braulio, from the siwapp users group, who couldn’t find the right symbol for his country’s currency (the colon). He researched and pointed me to this set of fonts, which I think will came really handy.

among other things, we have now access to three special fonts:

1. serif-condensed
2. sans-serif-condensed
3. sans-serif-ultralight

which I think the heavy text users will appreciate.

also, I rearranged all the pdf fonts related wiki pages

PS: 0.4 is almost out. watch out translators!!!!

when rendering an html template to build a pdf, if a table cell with the “rowspan” attribute is break because a page change, the pdf engine will throw a nice “frame not found in cellmap” exception, as describe here

We’ve already changed our default template to make sure it doesn’t include any rowspanned cell (yes, it used to). When you build your own invoice template, please take this into account.