siwapp - Free online invoice system » development

New system requirements for 0.3 release

Carlos Escribano — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:12:27 +0000

As we have said many times, we like things simple both for the user as for the rest of developers. To simplify programming and improve the performance of siwapp, we added the use of triggers in the database. What does this mean? It means that when a figure changes, the database automatically updates the total bill calculations.

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.

New templating system adopted

Carlos Escribano — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:51:42 +0000

It’s wonderful to see how the community of developers is producing high quality tools that can be used in our projects.

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.

0.2 alpha RC3

Carlos Escribano — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:34:21 +0000

We have updated the 0.2 alpha with a few new bug fixes and without the ability of managing templates (you will see a notice if you attemp to access that section).

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 .

Testing Tripoli

Carlos Escribano — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:31:07 +0000

That’s my new task. I think Yahoo! YUI Library is too large and complicated to use only the CSS reset and fonts files, and it does not provide a flexible way of measuring items for layout in em’s. But it was the best we found until now.

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.