Chris Travers wrote:
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Darren Wiebe <..hidden..> wrote:I'd be very interested in seeing this also. I run an oscommerce store and I've been manually transferring invoices but this would be much slicker.One thing I would highly suggest is making such a bridge open source and build a community around it. It allows everyone to work more closely together, and divides up the work so no one party is maintaining the whole bridge code.
I think you are right. I've mulled the whole thing over overnight and although I never intended it to be much more than a simple order synchonisation bridge, it could actually be a lot more. I'll get a sourceforge project opened for it.
I'll have a lot better idea of what direction to go after I've been using it in anger for a couple of weeks. To give you some idea of the background, I've been running a small web business as a sole trader for a couple of years using Oscommerce and Gnucash. I have a couple of scripts that take Oscommerce orders and dump them out in qif format so I can import the financials direct into Gnucash. This works fairly well but I'm running into the business limitations of Gnucash, specifically the fact that it's handling of invoices is single currency only. I've been playing with first SQLedger and then LedgerSMB for about a year as an alternative and decided to build the bridging software and switch over to LedgerSMB and a Limited Company on the 1st Jan 2009. I'm mostly there. I've imported my customer base and my parts list into LedgerSMB and today I will start importing orders. Once I'm happy that it is fairly stable, I will run it regularly under cron and shift the majority of order processing to LedgerSMB. In my experience the best way to make deficiencies in code obvious is to start using it for real.
I think that such a project would be very popular and open up economic opportunities to those involved.
Indeed... Nigel