Initial steps for 1.6, and some longer-term questions

Hi;

As folks know here I have made several major attempts to rewrite the financial logic but it is a very big task and I never get as far as I would like. While 1.6 is already expected to have great improvements in multicurrency support, I am not expecting to do a lot on financial code at present.

There are a few things architecturally however that I would hope to accomplish with 1.6:

1. From 1.2 through 1.4, east of installation has not been a priority and has degraded We need to reverse that. Ease of installation and management needs to be a top priority. I think we havve the back-end stuff down, so the question is front-end and administrator tooling.

2. Contact and user management has become more feature-rich but harder to use. The code here has also become bit of a mess even though it is rewritten code. I would like to fix these problems too.

3 Workflow and usability issues need to be the top priority.

On a technical side, I would like to switch to external tooling for administration and management. This means one gets the admin tools, and can install and manage LedgerSMB instances from there. It also means these tools need to play really well together.

I would also like to have the contact and user interfaces primarily client-side _javascript_ driven by Dancer-based web services. This would make things much easier to manage the code.

As we get into that process, I am hoping that we will be better equipped to discuss options for removing legacy code in an orderly manner. If the external tooling approach works well for administrative tools, we could opt to do this for financial logic. If it doesn't work so well, we will need to find another approach.

Best Wishes,

Chris Travers

Efficito: Hosted Accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.

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