OFBiz Blog - July 2016 Update

[Sharan-F]

Hi Everyone

Our monthly blog update is now available at the link below

https://blogs.apache.org/ofbiz/entry/apache_ofbiz_news_july_2016

As always, big thanks to Michael and Jacques for their help in reviewing it and putting it together.

Taking a quick look at the list of improvements and bug fixes, the amount of work that has been done over the month has been amazing. Thanks to everyone that has worked (and is continuing to work :-) on making OFBiz even better.

Thanks
Sharan

[Todd Thorner]

Yes, the work being accomplished is admirable.  There have been quite a
few new contributor sign-ups lately, so hopefully the codebase will
continue to progress & excel.

Here's a question: is there a process within the OFBiz project, beyond
JIRA, for gathering feature requests from users?  A userbase survey
might be helpful at this Gradle juncture (e.g. I noticed some
over-my-head threads on this ml regarding things like minilang scripting).



On 16-08-09 11:08 AM, Sharan Foga wrote:

> Hi Everyone
>
> Our monthly blog update is now available at the link below
>
> https://blogs.apache.org/ofbiz/entry/apache_ofbiz_news_july_2016
>
> As always, big thanks to Michael and Jacques for their help in reviewing it and putting it together.
>
> Taking a quick look at the list of improvements and bug fixes, the amount of work that has been done over the month has been amazing. Thanks to everyone that has worked (and is continuing to work :-) on making OFBiz even better.
>
> Thanks
> Sharan

[Sharan-F]

Hi Todd

I think the mailing list is a good tool for talking about potential new features. If there is some functionality that someone wants then having a discussion about it on the mailing list helps to find others from the community with the same or similar requirements.

Do you already have something in mind? If so then please feel free to start a discussion thread on this list about the functionality you are looking for. (Sometimes it might already exist but not everyone knows about it :-).

On the survey side, I've run a few community surveys in the past so I'd be interested to hear your ideas about a potential user base one and the type of information it could collect. I will start a discussion thread about the survey, so please feel free to add your comments and feedback.

Thanks
Sharan

On 2016-08-09 20:28 (+0200), Todd Thorner <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Yes, the work being accomplished is admirable.  There have been quite a
> few new contributor sign-ups lately, so hopefully the codebase will
> continue to progress & excel.
>
> Here's a question: is there a process within the OFBiz project, beyond
> JIRA, for gathering feature requests from users?  A userbase survey
> might be helpful at this Gradle juncture (e.g. I noticed some
> over-my-head threads on this ml regarding things like minilang scripting).
>
>
>
> On 16-08-09 11:08 AM, Sharan Foga wrote:
> > Hi Everyone
> >
> > Our monthly blog update is now available at the link below
> >
> > https://blogs.apache.org/ofbiz/entry/apache_ofbiz_news_july_2016
> >
> > As always, big thanks to Michael and Jacques for their help in reviewing it and putting it together.
> >
> > Taking a quick look at the list of improvements and bug fixes, the amount of work that has been done over the month has been amazing. Thanks to everyone that has worked (and is continuing to work :-) on making OFBiz even better.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Sharan
>
>

[Todd Thorner]

Thanks for the reply, Sharan.

I like the idea of a formal survey, which might carry more gravitas in
the medium term.  Mailing list threads tend to be informal, and ideas
therein can get forgotten or even buried (not that it has happened here
... but it's a classic bureaucratic trick to offer opinion polls to the
plebes instead of referenda).  With a mailing list free-for-all, the
thousandth or so feature request that comes in might cause people to
forget about the first two or three threads from weeks previous.

Would it be possible for the OFBiz steering committee (or whatever it's
called) to send out a ml call for feature requests every other year or
so (aside: I see you did just that today so thanks), and then collate
all the feature requests from the most recent ml cattle call into a more
formal survey?  I wasn't following the recent "new logo" threads, but I
got the impression that those involved were using a similar approach.

I agree with Taher Alkhateeb that a modular OFBiz featuring plugin
functionality would be nice, although I'm just an amateur software
developer so I don't understand the pros/cons of such a strategy or its
potential need for refactoring.

In any case, my thanks go out to you and all the contributors for
continuing efforts.



On 16-08-09 11:46 AM, Sharan Foga wrote:

> Hi Todd
>
> I think the mailing list is a good tool for talking about potential new features. If there is some functionality that someone wants then having a discussion about it on the mailing list helps to find others from the community with the same or similar requirements.
>
> Do you already have something in mind? If so then please feel free to start a discussion thread on this list about the functionality you are looking for. (Sometimes it might already exist but not everyone knows about it :-).
>
> On the survey side, I've run a few community surveys in the past so I'd be interested to hear your ideas about a potential user base one and the type of information it could collect. I will start a discussion thread about the survey, so please feel free to add your comments and feedback.
>
> Thanks
> Sharan
>
> On 2016-08-09 20:28 (+0200), Todd Thorner <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> Yes, the work being accomplished is admirable.  There have been quite a
>> few new contributor sign-ups lately, so hopefully the codebase will
>> continue to progress & excel.
>>
>> Here's a question: is there a process within the OFBiz project, beyond
>> JIRA, for gathering feature requests from users?  A userbase survey
>> might be helpful at this Gradle juncture (e.g. I noticed some
>> over-my-head threads on this ml regarding things like minilang scripting).
>>
>>
>>
>> On 16-08-09 11:08 AM, Sharan Foga wrote:
>>> Hi Everyone
>>>
>>> Our monthly blog update is now available at the link below
>>>
>>> https://blogs.apache.org/ofbiz/entry/apache_ofbiz_news_july_2016
>>>
>>> As always, big thanks to Michael and Jacques for their help in reviewing it and putting it together.
>>>
>>> Taking a quick look at the list of improvements and bug fixes, the amount of work that has been done over the month has been amazing. Thanks to everyone that has worked (and is continuing to work :-) on making OFBiz even better.
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> Sharan
>>