Hi Jeff, Welcome to the Apache OFBiz ecosystem!
I would recommend you to check out the official website[1], Getting Started for Developers[2] & Business users[3] and the confluence documentation[4]. >The confluence site is a web of confusion. For example Thanks for raising the concerns. The community is striving to improve the documentation. We have various documentation efforts going on with Ascidocs etc, we will definitely try to improve the experience. > The "Getting Started" link at > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Apache+OFBiz+Getting+Started Thanks for reporting, it was outdated. I have updated it with the Developers[2] and Business users[3] links https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Home > Has a number of recent updates (which I read and followed perfectly), but > they are in the confluence "Wiki Attic" breadcrumb. Which is confusing. > Here is the most recent example: > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/How+to+install+OFBiz+with+the+Demo+Data When pages become outdated they are not deleted but moved to Attic. Some references and indexes on search engines may still be there. > Release Concerns > 17.12.04 was just released, but I saw in a commit log reference to an 18.12 > release. I can't find anything related to it, other than a few posts to > the user mailing list from July 2019. What happened to the 18.12 release? The latest release is 17.12.04[5], 18.12 is another release branch that is stabilized for a given time period and may replace the 17.12 for the new releases after some time. HTH 1. https://ofbiz.apache.org/index.html 2. https://ofbiz.apache.org/developers.html 3. https://ofbiz.apache.org/business-users.html 4. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Documentation#Documentation-End-UserDocumentation 5. https://ofbiz.apache.org/download.html Thanks and regards, Aditya Sharma On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 11:59 PM Jeff Schwartz <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello, I've been reading quite a bit about OFBiz and am interested in using > it to build some business applications. The project appears under active > development with recent releases, however, I'm a little concerned about the > lack of community updates and stale documentation. Here are some examples: > > The latest "news", i.e. social media and blog posts, are from 2019. > > All the "useful" OFBiz books were published in the 2008-2013 range > > The confluence site is a web of confusion. For example > > From the home page at > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Home > > The "Getting Started" link at > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Apache+OFBiz+Getting+Started > > is in the confluence "Trash" as seen in the breadcrumb. > > On the "Getting Started" page is a blurb that says > > > This document has been moved to the OFBiz website: > > http://ofbiz.apache.org/apache-ofbiz-getting-started.html > > Clicking that link gives a 404 > > Another example: > > The "How to articles" page at > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/How-to+articles > > Has a number of recent updates (which I read and followed perfectly), but > they are in the confluence "Wiki Attic" breadcrumb. Which is confusing. > Here is the most recent example: > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/How+to+install+OFBiz+with+the+Demo+Data > > Release Concerns > 17.12.04 was just released, but I saw in a commit log reference to an 18.12 > release. I can't find anything related to it, other than a few posts to > the user mailing list from July 2019. What happened to the 18.12 release? > > I do believe that OFBiz can be a great backbone for my business > applications, but I have the following concerns: > > - It will be difficult for developers to get acclimated to the project > based on the documentation and books as described above. > - With no recent "news" the project is stagnating and losing momentum > - The latest point release is from two weeks ago, but the major release > was from 2017 > > Based on these, I'm concerned about hitching my wagon to the project. > > Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated. > > Thanks in advance > > -Jeff
