Update for the 2 months until April 14th, 2011

With this update we try to keep the sentences shorter, and rather include a link to a more detailed page for those that are interested in that particular topic.

We are sorry that it has taken us so long to write an update, but things have been busy, which is definitely a good thing.

• The ICCM in February has been good. It would be good if there were more people next time, otherwise it would be a shame for all the effort put in by a number of excellent people.
• We presented OpenPetra at the Kongress Christlicher Führungskräfte in Nürnberg, you can find a couple of pictures here: http://bit.ly/fJbtMI; We still have to follow up several contacts.
• We are planning a cooperation with http://www.tbits.net/ who are willing to provide the hosting for OpenPetra. This will be of great benefit for all sizes of organisations, and will free the developers of OpenPetra of the hosting tasks. If you are interested in this, contact Timotheus at timotheus.pokorra@solidcharity.com. For the technical people: See the wiki page on http://bit.ly/fJdgLL about some issues with .net Remoting related to this.
• Work has progressed on the online registration and especially the backend for the registration offices. There is a blog item at http://bit.ly/g9Cah5 about how to setup Mono and Ext.Net. We have now cleaner code-behind files.
• We have now a new sub-forum where the developers can ask finance related questions. Thanks and Welcome to Alwyn and Simon who are helping us as financial experts there!
• We have released Version 0.2.8 in the middle of February, but this version is quite old again, the following things have been implemented since. So watch out for another release soon!
• There has been an important change to the build architecture, that ThiasG has been working on. We are still improving on that. See the blog of Thias for more details: http://bit.ly/edqMF3
• MatthiasH has been busy on the gift system. We now have recurring gift batches, which can eventually be used for direct debit and other regular donations that the charity can rely upon. Matthias has also worked on adjusting and reverting gift batches.
• WolfgangU has worked on support for foreign currencies. He is currently working on period closing and year end closing.
• RobP has helped us on the forum and answering our questions to understand the finance system.
• WolfgangB has worked on some reports for the personnel module.
• Joachim has got great people to work on the spanish translation, and he is also working on the new OpenPetra website for better translation. He is using WordPress and http://www.qianqin.de/qtranslate/.
• Chris has joined OpenPetra development in the beginning of April, fulltime! Welcome! He will be joining the work on the finance module.
• ChristianK has worked on this:
  • improved unhandled Exception handling
  • writing specifications for the creation of more Maintain Tables. Those screens can be done by novice software engineers.
  • Specifying tasks for the two students at Taylor University. They are continuing with work that got started when the Taylor University students were with OM ICT in Carlisle.
  • Updating data that is used to track the progress of the openPETRA Project.
  • Ongoing co-ordination with volunteers and interested educational institutions.
  • Some progress in Architecture Discussions was made.
  • Work on making data validation work properly in various situations has been started.

Thank you for your interest and support,

Timotheus for the OpenPetra developers.