On Jan 4, 2007, at 3:42 AM, Andrew Ballantine wrote:
I think what David is saying is the OFBiz open source project can only
support and develop the framework in the direction that the major
contributors wish to go. And I fully understand that.
...
Some of you have commented that you would not like to see a fork
and I most
definitely agree. There is no technical requirement for a fork. What I
envisage is a sub-project that works on the usability,
presentation, sample
data, OOTB functionality and installability issues that we have been
discussing. The under-lying framework would be OFBiz. If different
vertical
markets require different procedures within the framework, then I
would
suggest that conditional code in the framework be used to handle
different
"Flavours" of use. The advantage of this is that anyone modifying the
Framework code can see what effect their changes might have on a
different
flavour of the framework.
Some obvious flavours might be:
USA accounting and taxation
EU accounting and VAT with various country flavours
Manufacturing
Direct Sales
Retail shop
eCommerce
...
These flavours would be set at install time in the configuration
files, but
interpreted at run time.
Much of this functionality, as you've noted, is available out of the
box. To get it running how you need or want takes a bit of effort
because the options are rather granular.
A lot these OOTB flavours, or "industry specific configurations"
could certainly be part of OFBiz. The best mechanism for this is
probably to create flavour-specific data file that would sit on top
of the basic seed data files. The one to use can be selected when you
are setting up your database, and once OFBiz is running you could
have a pre-configured company, sample products, and so on waiting for
your personalization, but specific to your industry as opposed to
bering very generic like the current demo data is.
-David
