Posts by Gil Forcada:
- SMF Manifest to ease start and stop of Openbravo with dependencies
- Scripts to take ZFS Snapshot backups and restore of entire Openbravo, database filesystems.
Openbravo 2.40 on OpenSolaris Toolkit released
September 9th, 2009 Openbravo 2.40 on OpenSolaris Toolkit is now available which will help users get better user experience with Openbravo 2.40 on OpenSolaris.The project home is on an Openbravo Forge project.
The toolkit consist of the following:
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Translations @ Openbravo
March 19th, 2009 Hi everyone!Translating a piece of software is a key part of the process to make an application more friendly to non English speakers. The best software cannot reach all its potential audience if it is not translated to other languages than English. Localization is key to reach new users and markets in ERP, and in Openbravo we have always devoted lots of attention to it.
Today we are introducing a new tool for translators, http://translations.openbravo.com. It shows the translation statistics in real-time for the languages that are available for Openbravo ERP.
To build these translations, we download the translations files from the source code control system automatically and create these statistics. Everything is recalculated every 15 minutes. If you are translating Openbravo ERP, we encourage you to keep updating the Subversion repository so you will be able to keep track of your progress and see the amount of work that has to be done to reach the 100% mark.
Words and Strings
To get a better picture of what is missing, the statistics not only provide the strings that are left to translate, but also the words that those strings contain.
Usually translators prefer to count by words since it's a fine-grained quantity over strings. If there are only 3 strings, but each one has ~1000 words it's not the same work as 100 strings with only one or two words.
For this reason, each table line has a double progress bar and statistics, one for strings and another for words. This can be seen in the top-most field of the line.
Files
Each language and version have their own detailed page showing the statistics per file (Italian from trunk for example). If there's a reference language (or more concrete a corresponding directory in the C directory structure in Subversion) it will update the language file if the translated file is older than the reference file.
With this all statistics are up to date and show the exact numbers of strings and words that are missing.
Warnings
Maybe you have already noticed the 
and 
icons.
The first one means that the language has some files with the same icon, in which case means that the xml file has some errors. Most of them are related to errors occurring while parsing the xml file; just opening the file in a web browser usually says what the error is (for example the AD_ELEMENT_TRL_ro_RO.xml).
The second one means that the language or file has more than 80% of the user interface translated (such as the Bulgarian translation). This is a good indicator as to whether enough has been translated for use. With 80% of the user interface translated, it's most likely that you will find just a few strings not translated.
Missing and extra files
As time passes it's most likely that new files for translating appear and others are removed because they are no longer used. This is also reflected in the statistics.
If there's a file in the reference language, but not in the translated language, this file will be displayed in the files table with a white background (see Catalan for example).
The extra files (the ones that are in the directory structure but are not in the reference language) are grouped in a list at the bottom of the files table (see the Finnish for an example).
Next steps?
Every piece of software can be improved and we want to improve it to match our translator´s needs. Any suggestion, concern and comment is more than welcome at our Translations & Localizations forum at Sourceforge.
Any feature request or issue can be logged at our issue tracker in the Translations stats project.
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Categories
March 17th, 2009 Our wiki is improving as days goes by.If some days ago I talked about the new hierarchies system today is for categories.
Some months ago Jordi made a proposition a new category layout for our wiki and now I'm really excited to come here and say that it's already done!
What means for users? Basically that it will be a lot easier to browse inside the categories, Openbravo POS is a full citizen of our wiki with its owns categories and that this is the ground for keeping up with all new articles that are created daily.
The full category hierarchy can be seen in the wiki administration article (or interactively in the category tree article). We are satisfied with the new category system, but don't hesitate to send recommendations, there's always space for improvements.
Thanks for reading!
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Hierarchies
March 13th, 2009 Hi all!A new feature has landed in Openbravo's wiki: Hierarchic content.
With this new feature one should be able to navigate wiki articles like if it was a single article but split with several articles.
A nice index will be shown in the articles top-right:
Also at the end of the articles there will be a couple of links to the next and previous articles.
As always, the Help article has been updated to show how to use it.
You can already see it in action in the Modularity Videos.
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Introducing Fancy dancy
August 4th, 2008 Are you tired to having to paste this each time you want to make a fancy box?{|border="0" cellpadding="2" |<div class="t"><div class="b"><div class="l"><div class="r"><div class="bl"><div class="br"><div class="tl"><div class="tr">
<div class="showbox">
Some cool stuff, indeed.
</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div>
|}
Now you can use the new and shiny template Fancydancy!
So the previous text is reduced to:
{{Fancydancy|Some cool stuff, indeed.}}
I tested it and it works really well, you can insert anything you want. Take a look at an example, as you can see, there are lists, preformatted text, bold and italic texts and links inside it!
Enjoy it and when you see some ugly div code around our wiki remember our new template and give some love to our wiki :)
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A few Openbravo wiki guidelines
July 30th, 2008 Hi all!To ensure our wiki is properly maintained we need to ensure that everyone knows how to edit it.
So, the objective of this blog post is to highlight some of the frequent mistakes or not-known features that some of you do while editing our wiki.
Internal links
To link from one article to another article in our wiki just write:
[[Article-name | some text]]
i.e: [[Openbravo community installation | installation guide]]
The "| some text" part here is optional, it will be the text shown as a link.
The most commmon mistake here is to add the full URL, i.e.:
[[http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Openbravo community installation | installation guide]]
Preformatted text
To make preformatted text (i.e. the grey brackground text like in:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Openbravo_environment_installation#Gentoo ) just put a space BEFORE the text:
like this
Or if it's really required you can use some <pre>text</pre> format, but try to use the other option, it's less typing and more the way that the wiki format says.
Templates
Templates are used to put the same kind of content in pages. Like the Language header or the rating poll.
There are lots of them:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Special:Uncategorizedtemplates
Some help about how they work:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Help#Templates_usage
Try to use them as much as possible (and when applicable!), not just because is less typing, but also because if, for example, we have to change our bugtracker we will just need to change the template and everything will work, hardwritten links to the bugtracker will be broken.
Categories
Categories are used to group articles by their kind of information (Community, Development, OpenbravoPOS ...) and having a good categorisation is key to have better searches and better organisation.
Please try to add at least one category at every new article. If you don't know in which category belongs an article surf the categories and try to find articles on the same topic as the one you have written and use the same category.
All categories:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Special:Categories
To add a category to an article just type at the bottom of the article:
[[Category: Category-name]]
Italic and bolds usage
To make some text italic just type:
''some text'' (double single quotes :)
To make some text bold just type:
'''some text''' (triple single quotes :)
Use italic when you are referring to UI text, citation texts, file names, object properties, etc etc
Use bold carefully. Bold text is used to highlight some ideas or important statements, but are useless if a whole paragraph is bold. Look at the final examples to see what I mean.
Images
You know: An image is worth 1,000 words.
Just be sure to read the Images section in our help:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Help#Images
If your are drawing a diagram make sure to upload as a .svg format (every professional diagram-based editors). Everyone will be able to see it (since it's a standard format, not a proprietary one) and more importantly if someone (like me) has to modify or update it he/she will be able to edit it directly without having to make it again from scratch.
Titles
For title choosing see our Help:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Help#Titles
Also for translators:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Help#Translating_documentation
Blank lines, spaces and usability
In Mediawiki (the wiki software) when you make a line break it just ignores it. So it's only useful while editing the article.
To make a new paragraph you have to add a blank line between the two paragraphs.
So, my plan (as you can see as from Monday and further edits) is adding two blank lines before any new section title (i.e. any line that has some text surrounded by equal signs ===== text ==== ) and another one after the title.
For better readability add a new blank line before and after a list (the lines that start with * or #) and a space between the character (# or * and the start of the content). For example:
# One
# list
# that's
# easy
# to
# read
It's quite a challenge to find anything in less than 30 seconds in a wiki edit box if there isn't any blank link anywhere :)
As a maybe not really useful for readability purposes, but necessary for better browse-ability, try to make the lists without blank lines between elements, not just because if you separate them they create a new list for each element, instead, think about a blind person, if he is reading something like this:
Openbravo enhancements for the next release, see the list below:
* New modularity system
* Better integration with BI
...
As a last note in usability, some of you are already doing it, so for the few of you that doesn't add it, please, add a cellpadding="5" to the tables, so they will be a little bigger, but will be better readable.
Just modify the header:
{| border="1"
with:
{| border="1" cellpadding="5"
User talk pages
From now on to ping someone to discuss something, to thanks him/her for updating an article or ask the administrators to give you advice, use the personal talk pages.
A personal talk page looks like (just change my user name for the user you want to ping):
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/User_talk:Gforcada
Just a small recommendation when editing a talk page: always end your message with --~~~~ (or click the second button starting from the last one - from left to right- and it will add it for you).
With this little syntax you will add your user name and a timestamp, so when you take a look at someone has said something in your talk page you will see how many time has passed from that day.
Style guide and more help
Make sure you read, at least once, our Help page:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Help
And the style guide inside it:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Help#Style_Guide
Final examples
Just two visual examples (and as I said it's not anything personal) that I came across this Monday:
First:
before:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/index.php?title=Openbravo_ERP_installation&oldid=15728
after: http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Openbravo_ERP_installation
Second
before:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/index.php?title=Projects/Project_Service_Management_Review/Development_Status&oldid=13442
after:
http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Projects/Project_Service_Management_Review/Development_Status
Thanks for reaching this point! I hope from now on everyone will have a better understanding about how our wiki works :)
Regards,
Gil Forcada
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Barcelona Get Together Slides
May 9th, 2008 Hi all,Since it's my first post in Planet Openbravo I should introduce myself:
I'm Gil Forcada, working at Openbravo in the community department (as Jordi already introduced me). For any comments or suggestions I'm always available at gil.forcada at openbravo dot com
.
Looping back to the title, finally, the slides and their audio are available online. So, if you didn't get the chance to be there or you want to listen again any presentation it's your opportunity.
We hope it will be useful.
Regards,
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