State of OpenPetra in February 2019
Since the last update, a lot of time has passed. Also a lot of things have changed.
Without going into details, here are the major points:
- In summer 2017, I decided to stop the sync between the OM ICT version of OpenPetra and the Open Source OpenPetra. The reason for keeping the two forks in sync was that at one point, technology improvements would be merged back into the OM ICT branch of OpenPetra. But this did not happen, and it was too much work for just staying in sync. OM is busy working on rolling out their version of OpenPetra across most of their bases around the world, which is encouraging.
- The split from OM meant, I could drop the Winforms client completely from the code, and the codebase was reduced significantly.
- Work started in earnest on the Javascript client, with the goal that OpenPetra could be used in the web browser.
- In summer 2018, a lot of work was sponsored by TBits.net on the Javascript client, with my apprentice working on it in full-time for a couple of months.
- On August 1st 2018, the Nazareth Charity switched to an early version of OpenPetra running in the web browser.
- In autumn 2018, TBits.net pulled out of OpenPetra, for various reasons.
- In autumn 2018, I refactored the reporting engine, which makes it now a lot easier to write and understand reports.
- On December 24th 2018, www.openpetra.com went online, which is a hosted service of OpenPetra for charities for an affordable price. This service is run by my own business, Timotheus Pokorra Software aka SolidCharity.com.
- In the beginning of January 2019 the focus was on the manuals, in german and english. see https://docs.openpetra.org
- In the end of January 2019, the annual gift receipt printing was introduced on OpenPetra in the web-browser, directly producing a PDF file from an HTML template.
I continue to work on OpenPetra as a minimum viable product. I want to know from real users if OpenPetra is going into the right direction.
I invite everyone to have a look at https://demo.openpetra.org for just playing around with non-real data.
If you are interested indeed, you are very much welcome to use your own instance of OpenPetra at https://www.openpetra.com. The first month is free, and the subscription is very much affordable and will ensure further development of OpenPetra.
I am hoping that users will support each other in the forum (https://forum.openpetra.org), and a community will be built.
For developers, or if you want to host your own OpenPetra, there are instructions https://github.com/SolidCharity/OpenPetraScripts/blob/master/Readme.md refering to useful scripts in the same repository, and links to the test RPM packages of OpenPetra.
My current goal is to target small charities, where the administration staff are not working full-time on administration. Just because the software is not ready yet for bigger organisations.
The long-term goal is for OpenPetra to grow to be usable by mid-size charities. But that will take time, and a lot of work.
Your input and feedback is much appreciated! Please join us in the forum!
All the best,
Timotheus Pokorra