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

This past week, I was in Portland, Oregon, attending OSCON. The conference was great but one of the best surprises was to find out that TriMet, the local public transportation agency, uses Openbravo POS for its direct sales to public.

With more than 2 million people in his greater area, Portland has been called the greenest city in the United States and the second greenest city in the world. It is also considered one of the cities with the highest standard of living in the US and its public transportation system is one of the things that Portland residents are very proud of.

In August 2007, TriMet installed Openbravo POS - then Tina POS - in its public ticket office to sell tickets and passes to the public. The sales outlet is located in Pioneer Square, in the heart of the city, and houses 5 POS terminals.
The average sale at these terminals is $45 and in the past year they processed more than 100,000 transactions for about of $4.5 million. This represent about 6% of passenger fare revenues for TriMet.


At the time of the selection, they evaluated Openbravo POS against some the most popular commercial POS solutions and our beloved open source application came out on top. The deciding factors were its simplicity, rich functionality and the quality of its code.
The implementation project was very rapid and within a very short period, TriMet had integrated Openbravo with its existing payment service, selected the hardware for the terminals, and was up and running serving its customers.

TriMet was kind enough to invite me and visit the sales office and talk to both the IT and customer service personnel. Everybody is very pleased with the system and the benefits it brings. The transaction time is very fast and people can buy their fares without having to wait in line for too long. The POS is also used to track the inventory (tickets, passes, maps, etc. - many of which are almost cash equivalent and need to be tracked very closely) as it moves from the back office to the individual sales desks; this has greatly improved management visibility and reduced errors.

Every once in a while, somebody that we didn't know before contacts us to share their Openbravo success story and it is always great to discover new users that are making good use of our software. This, however, was a particularly fun and rewarding experience for me and I felt a great sense of pride to see Openbravo supporting such an important service in such a great city.

After a few weeks of work we are very excited to present our new homepage for the Openbravo Wiki.

One of the objectives of the new design was to give its own entity and weight to the Openbravo POS project. This project joined the Openbravo family when the Wiki was already working. In the recent months, Openbravo POS documentation has been growing and required a more nicer fit. Now, when you enter the main page you have two tabs that allow you to switch the content for both projects.

Openbravo Wiki is currently the main entrance to our community with currently 20.715 unique visitors (July 2008) and experiencing a steady monthly grow of 10%. We wanted to give more visibility to other news that happen around the project every week like the blogging and the Subversion activity.

We have a new 'Editorial content' area that will help us to highlight these important issues that have occurred around the project. On the bottom of the page, you have the new collaboration area where you have the fundamental links for these interested in start contributing to the project.

Gil Forcada has been also working on enhancing our documentation for the Wiki and establishing guidelines for the style and the content. Very soon he will be sharing with us some examples of how we can do better documents in the Wiki.

If you have suggestions for improvement let us know.

I spent the last few days at OSCON. What a great show!

I always find it refreshing and rejuvenating to take a few days away from my daily schedule and go to an event like this, where one can see what others are doing. I never cease to be amazed by the many interesting projects and by the amount of innovation that the open source community creates.

In addition, this was the 10th anniversary of OSCON, which coincides with the 10th anniversary of the term "open source software" and it was fantastic - especially for a newbie like me - to associate with the people that were there at the beginning and that made history in the software field.

I attended several events and most of them were remarkable. I found Tim O' Reilly's keynote particularly inspiring; he highlights three challenges and opportunities for the open source community: 1) cloud computing; 2) the programmable web; and 3) mobile open source. These three areas represent the new battleground in the competition between open and proprietary. While there are now increasingly viable open source alternatives to desktop and server application, Tim reminds us how important it is that the open source community succeeds in providing alternatives to these new proprietary platforms.
There is always more than one way to get at one problem and you should always have the freedom to choose.

I also enjoyed the birds of a feather sessions and in particular the two that Pentaho's James Dixon organized: "Commercial Open Source: Deceitful Capitalists, Pioneers of a New Frontier, or both?" and "Open Source Development Using Agile Methodologies".

Another great session I really loved was Meboo's Elaine Wherry's on hiring best practices: "Code is Easy, People are Hard". Elaine is a fun and talented presenter and her presentation was very insightful and a great reminder that software products are a reflection of the team that built them. I hope to see her slides posted on the OSCON site soon.

Finally, Paul Fenwick's "An Illustrated History of Failure" was one of the most entertaining sessions and a great lesson on presentation skills. I think there is a video of this presentation somewhere but I could not find it. If you do, please let me know.

The most valuable take away from this event, however, was the opportunity to interact with people who live and work in the open source community. In many cases, they work on things that are not directly applicable to my area of focus - open source ERP - but they always manage to energize me with their passion, new ideas, and fresh thinking.

In the last days many things regarding Openbravo ERP localization have occurred that we would like to share with you:

• Openbravo ERP R2.40 beta was released last week. The estimated effort of updating the translations from Openbravo ERP R2.3x to Openbravo ERP 2.40 is 5.000 words. This is a two days work effort of a full time translation. Rafa Roda, from Openbravo S.L, has already updated the Spanish localization to version 2.40. Starting from Openbravo R2.40 the only language pack that is included by default in Openbravo ERP is English. Spanish language, can be downloaded from SourceForge and installed like the rest of the additional languages.
  
  
• Phil Heenan has been working on Openbravo2PO as part of a more ambitious plan of enhancing the whole translation process for Openbravo ERP. Phil has already asked for feedback on his enhancements for the process. As result of his work, Openbravo2PO is now the tool that we recommend for translating Openbravo ERP and PO the recommended format. Openbravo2PO has been already used successfully in the German, Italian and Spanish translation efforts.
  
  
• Eduardo Argal (ear at openbravo dot com) is the new localization coordinator at Openbravo replacing me in this role. He is part of the localization Openbravo team and has a great experience in accounting and localization. If you have any questions regarding localization we recommend to use Openbravo ERP localization forum.
  
  
• Kenzo Repole, the localizer for Saudia Arabia, has been working on adding RTL (right-to-left) support for Openbravo. This will be part of Openbravo ERP R2.50. If you are interested in helping us in enhancing RTL support please contact Eduardo Argal (ear at openbravo dot com).
  

That's all for now.

One of the most important Openbravo POS user's demand is to localize Openbravo POS to different countries and cultures worldwide. One part of the localization is the translation of Openbravo POS.

Openbravo POS relies on the Java platform internationalization features for providing the translation of literals and locale parameters like the currency used and date and numbering formatting patterns.

With this technology, to add support for another language to Openbravo POS, is very easy. The new language files are just a set of plain text files that follows the properties syntax, and to install the new language files in Openbravo POS you only need to copy these files in to the Openbravo POS program folder. You do not need neither to compile the source code nor execute a complex process.

Openbravo is focusing on increasing the number of languages supported by Openbravo POS by developing tools and supporting all people that want to collaborate localizing Openbravo POS into new languages.

As a first step we have created a Subversion repository to hold all the language files in development for Openbravo POS, to support all the collaborators to translate the Openbravo POS literals and where everybody can see the progress of the development.

We are going to use this repository to package the language files for Openbravo POS and make them available for download in the Openbravo POS Sourceforge project page.

You can browse this repository going to https://dev.openbravo.com/websvn/localization-pos/translations/ or you can checkout a working copy executing svn co https://dev.openbravo.com/svn/localization-pos/translations/ translations. In the Openbravo POS Localization wiki document you can read about how to localize Openbravo POS, the status of the localization files , the languages that are being developed, the people involved, and how you can collaborate to translate Openbravo POS.

Right now we are trying to align the roadmap of Openbravo POS with the development of the localizations to assure that every future release of Openbravo POS we release also an up-to-date language package for as much languages as possible.

The first milestone we want to achieve is to release the language packages for the current version Openbravo POS 2.10 MP2 on July, 31th. We expect our collaborators and community do to their best to be able to release by that date a collection of language packages that the whole Openbravo POS community around the world enjoy.

Some weeks ago I was interviewed by Yossi Bhardi, the person behind the Open Source ERP Guru blog. I not only enjoyed the interview, which you can find here, but also having the chance to talk to Yossi for the first time. Yossi is one of those committed volunteers who invests his personal time in following the ERP Open Source revolution. The work he does from his blog is a great contribution in building the OS ERP market and therefore something that helps the whole industry. As I always mention when talking about other OS ERP players, the more successful we all are, the bigger the open source ERP stake of the market will become, for a greater number of customers to enjoy an offer which is more valuable, fair and easy to understand when compared to proprietary ERP solutions.

Thank you Yossi and keep up with the good work!

From the day I started working in Openbravo, we have been periodically conducting Offsites with all company employees. These are full day events in which we gather all Openbravo members who can make it (this year we had people in Miami that could not attend), in one place to:

• Celebrate achievements and progress together
• Give a brief update on the current status and plans for the coming months. Alignment of priorities are key to continue serving our community well.
• Work together on selected topics which are important to our business and people
• Participate in fun activities together. You know what they say… those who work hard, play hard! ;-)

This last OffSite has again brought me lots of good feelings and positive ideas to keep on making it happen. If anyone wants to understand what Openbravo’s biggest asset is… I’ll tell you right now... join Openbravo (whether as a community member, a partner, a customer or as an employee) and discover our amazing team!

I feel extremely proud on the almost 100 professionals from 15 different nationalities which are currently employed full time by the company, in a multitude of locations around the globe. Our people are highly professional, have the optimal knowledge and are passionate and committed to making it happen. And I tell you this … there is no better asset in a company like ours than people. People who work hard, play hard, and have fun doing both!

Ps_ Because the SanFermines holiday was right around the corner (the famous running of the bulls fair taking place in Pamplona), we had this Offsite in a bull fighting venue. This photo was taken in the arena where many Openbravo employees braved the bulls! By the way … nobody got hurt.