On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Todd Thorner <tthor...@infotinuum.com>wrote:
> Thank you, Mr. Byers, for posting such a remark-worthy suggestion, and > thank you, Mr. Rosser, for providing the inertia that might help start > an exciting new OFBiz-related project (congrats as well on securing a > happy jeweler client). > > I would be an enthusiastic participant in any documentation project > whose outcome helped business managers become dedicated OFBiz end users. > Indeed, I am one such hopeful business manager, excited by the prospect > of having OFBiz at the core of my transactional processes, daunted by > the IT learning curve. > > I am by trade a tech writer with over 15 years of experience, mostly > doing API docs for SDK products. I also have a Fine Arts degree in > Creative Writing, and those two properties combined make me one of the > most sought-after writers in the Vancouver IT industry. I am, though, > as I said, now working on becoming a successful business owner. > > From my perspective, this might be a proverbial golden opportunity. I > would learn a lot and move up that learning curve, plus I have much to > offer those who seek to improve OFBiz documentation and attract more > CFOs & CMOs to the product. > > I ask the community how a prospective team might start a workflow (Agile > or whatever) for such a project. Would a focal point of managing > productivity be JIRA or something like that? Is there an > eat-the-dog-food instance of OFBiz out there allowing authorized > contributors to use its Scrum functionality? Maybe even its CMS > interface? I would love to help make OFBiz compatible with any > arbitrary CMIS-compliant product, but that's just me... > > Thanks for everything that everyone does to make this product world-class. > > You're welcome Todd, I don't have a specific answer for the questions you raise. I generally go with whatever works with the team with whom I am working at the time. My priority, right now, is to first learn how to set up a multi-tenant installation of OFBiz, as well as a multi-site installation of wordpress; and then how to integrate the two so that OFBiz's ecommerce component can be used to handle payment for subscriptions to the contents on one or more of the sites in the Wordpress installation. I'd also want to be able to support use of, the relevant back office components (e.g. the accounting), for a venture that is focused on publishing. I then want to install Redmine, in order to be able to exploit it's project management features (including issue/bug tracking). I have not yet begun to see to what extent Redmine's capabilities are complementary to OFBiz's capabilities or how much overlap there may be, e.g., WRT the work effort components). While Redmine, itself, integrates into a couple version control products (notably Subversion), it does not seem to have, as far as I can tell, support for any of the UML diagrams. What I am keeping an eye out for is an open source product that both relates each UML diagram (such as a use case scenario) to one or more items on a wish list (easily created in Redmine), as well as relating each use case diagram to the code that implements it. Do you, or anyone else, know of an open source product that supports UML documentation, that could be integrated with Redmine? One that can construct a suite of UML documents given a codebase (and that can be used to construct a complete set of UML diagrams, or at least use case and E-R diagrams, for OFBiz, WordPress and Redmine), would be particularly useful as that could automatically provide core design documentation, and the use case documents could be used both to provide feature lists and a suite of howto documents. Is there any automated tool to make the documentation task easier? One of the things that makes this especially daunting is that OFBiz is Java while Wordpress is PHP and Redmine is Ruby. And there are a few features that do not seem to exist that I would probably implement in a mix of Perl and C++. Integration of web apps involving such a mix of languages is something I have not yet tried (all the web apps I have developed have been either entirely Perl (with JavaScript on the client side) or a mix of Java Servlets+JSP/JSF, so I am unsure of how to integrate two apps that use very different technologies, and especially how to maintain session info in that effort. Cheers, Ted
