Today I’m going through and optimizing the xsl for pBooks using xpath. It’s a little tedious, but it will be that much more manageable when I’m done.
Archive for November, 2007
Our i18n efforts took a big step forwards today as Rae got up and running with editing XSL documents. It was a good exercise to learn more about XSL, as well as properly format it for language translations.
While we still have a lot more work to do in terms of translating the actual text which is used throughout the program, the work she did today will make it much easier to use the translations when they are ready.
The localization efforts for supporting multiple currencies and time zones still needs work and is most definitely on the to-do list.
I’m working to make PBooks more easily customizable to attract more developers to the project, and so I made a few small changes today.
If you are a software developer and are reviewing open source bookkeeping projects, would you mind providing some feedback? Feel free to comment on this or any post or better yet join the forums. This is my first time running an open source project and one of the things I was looking forward to was peer review. I would really appreciate it, thank you.
Among the changes were some basic template modifications to allow easier simple modifications, like changing the logo and adding a footer. I’m planning a full fledged API but I do need to figure out the best way to do that. Probably XML-RPC, but I’m not sure yet.
The PBooks Live Demo Site is down, so please use the static demo until further notice:
This also means that the Trac is also down. Please be patience as we fix this issue.
UPDATE: We’re back online! Server just needed a restart. You can resume access to the live demo:
As I start work on the next milestone, I’m going to review some of the other open source accounting programs out there, like FrontAccounting, SQL Ledger, and GnuCash. Karl Schmidt also just introduced me to Phreebooks, which initially looked a lot like FrontAccounting, but is actually a totally different application.
I just remembered that FibuSQL also had support for accounting periods, so I should review that one too.
During the past few milestones, I’ve been working away on PBooks, and making a lot of important, though subtle progress. Today I’m working on accounting periods and I thought I’d share my ideas and ask for your thoughts.
- Accounting periods can be set by the user: arbitrarily, monthly, quarterly, yearly.
- Once an accounting period is defined, it can then be reconciled.
- Once an accounting period is reconciled, it can be locked from further editing (this is an important topic, but I’m just focusing on accounting periods for now).
- Each accounting period will have a beginning balance and an ending balance for each account, which will be carried over from the previous and to the next period, respectively.
I haven’t worked out the data model for the accounting periods just yet, but like everything else in PBooks I’m going to do my best to keep it simple.
Thanks always for your interest!
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