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Hello! Just a quick heads up - I’m doing some work on the account grouping functions and pages, and it will probably take a few days so if you checkout the subversion trunk, there will likely be bugs in the account groups sections.
The good news - this will be a major improvement. 
UPDATE - The main work is complete. The new setup requires the latest Nexista code from subversion though.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of “dogfooding”, see here.
It makes a big difference in the start of a project to have a ready use case, and thanks to my own personal use of PBooks, I just added a terrific new feature. Well, I think its terrific.
The feature is similar to the matching process, which is used to match transactions to additional accounts. For example, if you have a CSV file containing credit card transactions, in bookkeeping terms, those only represent half the journal entry. You can import those transactions into the ledger, and the matching page will show ledger transactions without a corresponding entry.
On the flip side, the posting page will display only the journal entries which need to have entries posted to the ledger.
If your more of a business process user as opposed to a accounting / bookkeeping user, this might not sound too exciting, but I think its pretty cool. I was able to implement this feature fairly easily thanks to the relatively new journal entry status field, which is a tiny int so it shouldn’t have too much of an increase on the database size.
Also, in my personal use of pbooks, I’ve ironed out several bugs which were hiding from general view. Since most of the bookkeeping work I’m doing is prior, I haven’t worked too much with the new business process models, but I will next week when my company sends out invoices, as well as whenever we receive a payment and / or make a deposit.
I just spent a few hours working on PBooks and I took these notes:
* Would it be helpful when viewing the ledger to have the start default to the start of the accounting period? It would help me.
* Creating invoices through PBooks is the way to go so that you don’t have to split payments based on revenue source - i.e. some invoices include hosting and professional services.
* Absolutely need a way to isolate entries which need to be posted to the ledger
* Found myself going back and forth between the journal and the ledger, having to fix entries and then repost to the ledger. Not fun.
I mostly spent the time entering data from bank statements and double checking the running balance. I also made several split transactions based on deposits, which reminds me, I want to share with prospective pbooks users how helpful photocopies of deposits are. When I was entering the bank transactions, I would look at a deposit and wonder, “Huh, I wonder what that was?” Several times the photocopy I made of the deposit was incredibly useful, reminding me that the deposit was made up of four or five items.
Everything ran OK, I hit and fixed a couple of small bugs, but in the end I’m quite pleased with how the software is performing.
We are continuing our testing, and today we moved onto the invoices portion of the PBooks application. The basic test I ran using the selenium IDE passed without any problems, it also passed when I added the test to the test suite in the core. So right off the bat, there don’t seem to be any major bugs.
I later submitted a few forms manually and picked up on a few issues Selenium wasn’t able to recognize. I discovered that if you input the date manually rather than using the date selection tool, it will not log your entry. Even if you use the same date format it still does not seem to work properly.
Also, after you submit a new form the client name does not display where it should.
There is no way to edit your submission from the main invoices page.
If you’ve been keeping an eye on PBooks, you’ll have noticed several minor releases lately. These releases are in preparation of making PBooks more stable. Although a public stable release is a long ways away, developers may try to use the software in a productive manner before then.
I, for one, am actually using PBooks on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, I need to keep the versions clean and distinct, and the upgrade path simple. To do so, I’ve implemented versioning for both the database and the code base, and have setup a minimal testing process to go through before each milestone is complete.
Working with trac has been a terrific learning experience, and although I plan to keep releasing early and often, the releases will be more granular in the features, functions, and fixes they represent.
Thanks as always for your interest!
Today I designed some tests with the Selenium IDE and then uploaded the tests onto the server to run using the core. The IDE only works in Firefox, while the Selenium core actually runs off of the page. This is useful because you can see how test results vary within different browsers. For example, I have found that just because something functions in Internet Explorer does not necessarily mean it will behave the same way in another browser. While manually running the tests I did not seem to run into any problems. I was able to add and delete new groups without any errors. The delete and edit buttons are working correctly.
The one issue I noticed was the fact that the organize account groups button is not working at the moment. I unfortunately had issues running the tests on the Selenium Core. Like I said, the manual run through went fine without any problems other than the organize button. Overall PBooks seems to be coming right along. We are working hard to iron out all of the bugs.
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