As many of you know, we take great pride in the transparency of our development process. In the spirit of that approach, I'd like to draw your attention to the Drop Ship Purchasing specification currently being written for development in the 3.5 release of xTuple. This fairly large feature is sponsored by a sole user, but we are confident that it will bring significant value to the broader...
xTuple's Collective Brainpower Blog
A couple of weeks ago I promised to talk about design bugs.
Simply put, a design bug is an error in thinking about how a problem should be solved. This is different from coding bugs, where the solution is basically correct but isn't written properly.
Here is a real example: Mantis issue 9632 (fixed for 3.5.0). The XML Import feature was designed to use the API Views . This...
With the advent of xTuple's new extension architecture , it's easier than ever for software developers to write custom add-ons to the core PostBooks product. This also means system administrators may now find themselves managing multiple applications in addition to their xTuple ERP--each having a slightly different version number than the next. To help everyone keep track of which version goes...
While economic conditions around the world continue to be challenging, here at xTuple we've been fortunate to have done better than most in 2009. We continue to see strong growth in customers, partners, and of course, our open source community. It's you - the tens of thousands of active participants in the xTuple ERP community — that make our success (and the continuing enhancement of xTuple ERP products) possible. We'd like to take this opportunity to say "thank you" — and to hopefully give a little something back as well.
I started to write a description of how to report bugs, but found that others have done a much better job than I could. Take a look at the following:
Simon Tatham's How to Report Bugs Effectively
http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php (written specifically for PHP but the general principles apply to any software you use).
With that out of the way, here's a...
Many of you whom I have met personally know that I am an instrument rated pilot. As a pilot I use checklists before during and after every flight. They are a very important part of aviation for many reasons. Checklists promote safety by ensuring that critical tasks are completed. They also ensure that these tasks are done in sequence and that they are performed at the right time. For example,...
How many of you out there have a Twitter account? Do you find it useful? Annoying? Trivial? Informative?
I've been on the fence, like many others. I've had a Twitter account for over a year. But as soon as I started following various users, I was appalled by the avalanche of blather that poured into my Twitter feed. I walked away from the whole phenomenon for a while, convinced that...
By Matthew Aslett
Earlier this year Jason van Zyl from Sonatype raised the question as to why so many open core software vendors hide the pricing details of their proprietary enterprise editions, pointing out that it was in their best interests to be transparent.
It's important to understand the advantages and drawbacks of using consulting firms to advise and assist your business.
First, the drawbacks: Some would say that consulting companies tend to run up their hours, and milk their customers for every last penny - that they cloak their deliverables in buzz-speak and gobbledygook, and live in terror of their clients discovering that they're...
If you've attempted any development on xTuple using scripting then you've probably found the debugging routine a bit tedious, to say the least. It has been mostly a manual process of reviewing the command line console for uncaught exceptions, and inserting try/catch blocks and print statements in your code to track down otherwise silent bugs. If you're running on Windows, it's all the worse...
Here in the U.S. we are about to take a couple days off to be with our families, eat turkey, and go shopping. That's right, this Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has become the biggest shopping day of the year. We want to get in on a little of this action ourselves — don't miss our announcements about year-end training deals and half-off paper forms, below.
We're looking forward to another great Intro to xTuple ERP community training class next week. It'll be held at our Norfolk, Virginia home office, and as usual, we'll have a great mix of partners and customers from a variety of industries. If you're looking for a high-impact way to get up to speed quickly on xTuple ERP (PostBooks, Standard, or Manufacturing Edition), then this is the class for...
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a significant factor in choosing an Enterprise Resource Planning solution. But it's another one of those TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) that not everyone seems to completely understand.
So what do I mean by TCO? It's the sum of all the costs associated with implementing a major software application. You should factor in not only the cost of the software...
Just a quick note to let everyone know about a patch release for all three Editions of xTuple ERP - version 3.3.1, available now. We aren't updating the installers, so if you're currently running 3.3.0, we highly recommend you upgrade. This release fixes a handful of obscure, but potentially unpleasant bugs.
All users can download the updated 3.3.1 client here .
Commercial...
It's true, the more people we have looking out for bugs, the better the software will be. We're so pleased with the support we've gotten in our Beta testing community. Thanks, everyone, for helping us make xTuple ERP a quality product!
Right now we're in between releases. This is the little pocket of time when the QA team gets to focus its attention on how to make the next testing...
Nagios, Splunk, SNMP are various monitoring tools that can alert you to the status of connectivity to your SQL server. While I would like to employ these tools to monitor our network, I find that I really just want a tool to tell me 'Hey! Go check the server! It ain't working because of x,y,z...'. Checkpg.sh is such a tool.
checkpg.sh is a simple shell script that can notify an admin...
When you provide solutions for small businesses, you get an interesting perspective on the overall economy. Small businesses in the United States are a primary driver of jobs and commerce, and provide good insight as to where the economy is heading. That's one of the best parts of this business — and of course, those growing companies are natural prospective users of xTuple software.
...
Just wanted to announce we recently updated the language files in the Translation Portal . This means all translators are now working on the most current code for xTuple ERP 3.3.0. Of course, 3.3.0 adds much for international users to be interested in. I'm talking especially about our expanded support for VAT and international taxes . So far the response to the tax improvements has been very...
Tomorrow is Halloween here in the U.S. — and we're celebrating by embracing our inner geek. Looking around the office, we see a number of people wearing trade show-issued black T-shirts with cryptic software industry jargon. And of course this month's xTupler is chock full of updates on improvements to scripting and packaging tools, new ways to interface with third-party products, little references to open source history and culture, and new xTuple beta software that is ready for testing!
Join us in Norfolk, VA on October 5th for the xTuple Power User Class and empower yourself to customize xTuple ERP to meet your specific needs. This in-depth, hands-on workshop covers the tricks of customizing xTuple to meet your specific company requirements, plus a variety of other administrator functionality detailed here: http://www.xtuple.com/training202
Ever thought about...