I recently went back there to make an upgrade and add a lot of new features, this is what I want to share in this post.
This application was my very first project with symfony and when I dived again in the code for all those new features I realized how much I learned in the past years... There are lot of things that I would do differently today (and I am not even considering here the use of symfony 1.2)!
Here is a quick list of what has been added in version 1.1:
- PDF support with Zend_Pdf. This allow to generate invoices and reports in PDF (mainly using templates). Zend_Pdf is stable and easy to integrate in symfony, the drawback of these kind of solution is their limitation and the cost of maintenance: you must draw everything per line and position each line on the page. I created some simple methods to right align or draw a simple table over several pages but it is really a pain! It seems some guys are working on improving Zend_Pdf (they actually released an alpha framework RE) to add to it some more advanced functions such as multiline content, table and so on. I hope it can come out soon...
- A new receipt system. Basically the new receipt system will split a payment into sub-receipts over several invoices if necessary and still keep track of the "physical" payment main receipt. With this we clearly identify where is the money, there are no more "floating" money in the contract balance. All supplementary payments are made against the oldest debt of the contract and the system cannot accept payment over the total balance.
- Some new modules: Fines & Products module to add one-shot cost in upcoming invoice for a customer. Some admin generated modules to easily modify some of the data (status, districts, categories...)
- Barcode support. You can now add a barcode in the invoice pdf file to ease payment and avoid human errors. This is not yet use in Timor because they do not have yet barcode reader but they seems very interested by this solution.
- Javascript switch: from Prototype to jQuery. To ease some development I simply switch to jQuery library instead of Prototype and we use a little bit more ajax call in the app when it make sens. I still want to add more in the future...probably when I start to migrate to sf1.2...not for tomorrow though...
- New UI design. Not big changes but still an improvement compare to before. It is still very "light web style" since I am not yet convince to go to a more rich UI. I am kind of fan of "Google style".
- More actions to give more flexibility to users to correct mistakes mainly: change tariffs, modify meter-contract relation information, re-calculate invoice...
- Bugs, bugs, bugs.
Business side:
- new tariff system to allow more complex tariff calculation.
- Dashboard. At login, user will see its own dashboard according to its authorization level. It will show some KPI and latest info/actions.
- Reporting. Change the reporting into a more user-controlled solution where the user can define the report she/he wants and get it in pdf (no idea yet on this ;-) or OpenDocument format.
- use of admin generator instead of manual dev for most of "master data" modules with a lot of ajax (more on this later as I am working on a new admin generator theme for this).
- Messaging Service. To ease communication between users or from system to users with memo, task assignment or system message. This is a symfony plugin I want to do for quite sometime already (including an event/calendar system too).
- Reporting. I want to make the reporting much easier and flexible for user to get the report he wants (not only pre-coded report). I also want to switch from the existing flash graph library to canvas based charts and/or open flash chart.
- Migrate to sf1.2 and write unit and functional test.
CS-4U is really a great project. I use for study and a new version will be welcome.
ReplyDeleteCongratularions, Estadieu!