Good Morning, I am certainly up for helping and for the meeting in Atlanta.
I have been thinking about this since I read Adam's email last night. It seems like my limited coding skill set means my time will be best spent working on documentation. It may not be as cool as other aspects, but it will never-the-less need to be done. Additionally, I think I can bring a unique and valuable perspective to the discussion of how to improve not only Plum as a product, but also it's perception in the larger coldfusion community. As I have already mentioned (and I am sure everyone on this list has ascertained already), my coding skills are very weak. In fact, before the project I am working on now, I have started quite a few, but completed only two websites, both in Dreamweaver...mostly design view. I rarely went over to the code view and when I did...I found it quite frustrating. For the sake of accuracy in what follows, I should mention I think I had a decent academic understanding of coldfusion constructs and sql. Also, the application I am working on has been in my head for the past three years and I have made several furtive attempts to develop it before now. That being said, within the next two weeks, my first real application will be ready for testing within my own company. I started working on it after CFUnited at the beginning of July, essentially in my spare time. Let me give you a before and after Plum comparison between the last website I built...BP (before Plum) and this application...AP(after Plum). SHORT VERSION: No. 1 PLUM ROCKS!!! (Especially for those who can't duplicate what Plum produces "out of the box") No. 2 PLUM MAKES A GREAT TUDOR. Working with plum demonstrates and teaches best practices. BP www.mdprofinish.com Developed in: Dreamweaver, 85% design view Layout: Tabular, page by page, inline html Number of folders: 5 Number of Files: 55 Size on disk: 550K Number of Database tables: 0 Security: None Function: brochure on the web AP (local host) Developed in: Dreamweaver, 100% code view (BTW Jeff has already developed code hint/completion for Dreamweaver) Layout: Tabular for form data, css for styles and layout of non-tabular page elements (<2% inline html) Number of Folders: 136 Number of Files: 1077 Size on Disk: 2.94 Mb Security: robust, roles based, easily implemented on a modular, page or section basis. Number of Database tables: 65 with referential integrity. Function: Set-up and enforce company wide business processes. Briefly including- Office Admin > Contacts, Appointments, Tasks, Job set-up, messages, Time Cards My Admin > variations/subsets of Office Admin based on role: customer, job leader, project manager, app admin Estimating > a complete online estimating system JobAdmin > Time Cards, Piecework tracking, Daily task tracking, Job journal, Job Paint schedules, Purchase orders, job completion reports, material ordering, Material usage Tracking Reporting > Daily individual production reports (incorporating Piecework, Daily task tracking and time cards from jobadmin) Daily Job production reports, Company wide production reports. I am not patting my own back, but Adam and David's back. From my intimate perspective, the difference between BP and AP is astounding. Not only am I going to see version 1.0 of a really cool application very soon, but I feel I have learned more in the last few months than I would have been able to learn in the next couple of years without Plum. I think most of the developers currently using PLUM may be too skilled to truly appreciate the purple power we all call Plum. I would love to help with documentation, evangelism and making sure Plum doesn't lose it's appeal for beginners. Thanks Adam and David, Mark Fuqua ********************************************************************** ********************************************************************** You can subscribe to and unsubscribe from lists, and you can change your subscriptions between normal and digest modes here: http://www.productivityenhancement.com/support/DiscussionListsForm.cfm **********************************************************************
