1.3 UI, user management, and sponsorship

[John Locke <..hidden..>]

Hi,

I've been on vacation a bit, and was interested in reading the 
sponsorship thread by Ed, along with Joshua's note about UI developments.

We're quite interested in working on the UI part of the system, though 
have needed to focus on billable work. With some sponsorship, we would 
love to work on this part of getting LedgerSMB out the door.

In previous discussions with Chris, I proposed using the Dojo Toolkit to 
implement lookups and other widgets in the interface, features that 
sound like need to be implemented. It would actually be quite simple to 
add to the template layer, with some extra handler subs defined for data 
calls.

You can get a feel for the work we're doing with Dojo on our demo 
server, http://demo.freelock.com. Project Auriga is our in-house 
application, under heavy development right now, and it uses Dojo Toolkit 
extensively. There's also LSMB 1.2 and trunk running there.

Specific things we've been planning to work on:

* Add json request handlers to LSMB, starting with the customer/vendor 
screens, adding subs to scripts/customer.pl that return json-formatted 
objects with requested data in a format that can be consumed by 
out-of-the box Dojo data stores

* Add specific dojo widgets to customer/vendor screens to start: tabbed 
interface, auto-complete search fields, date pickers, validation on text 
fields. Possibly also add a context-sensitive help pane to the interface 
(see "Show Help" in Project Auriga). Implement all widgets in a way that 
degrades gracefully, and works with Javascript turned off. Support IE6 
with Javascript on.

* Fix the login so you don't get a browser http auth window if you enter 
a bad password (note that Project Auriga passes http auth now, and we've 
resolved this issue across browsers--I'm about to write up a tech note 
describing how)

* Add user management interfaces to allow administrators to set up users 
with a particular set of roles

If Ed or anyone else can provide sponsorship for these features, we can 
start working on them much sooner--as a business here, I need to 
prioritize paying work first (so I can meet payroll!). You can contact 
me directly at john at freelock.com.


We've been planning to work on a tax module for destination-based sales 
tax, and a payroll module for quite some time, but haven't begun any of 
these since we've been waiting for 1.3 to stabilize...

--
John Locke
"Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems"
published by Charles River Media, June 2004
http://www.freelock.com