Apache OFBiz News January 2021

Welcome to our regular monthly round-up of OFBiz news. This month we also share with you some highlights from 2020 with our updates about new PMC members, release, user stories, and OMS discussions along with our usual list of features, improvements, and

Statistics.

Highlights 2020

As we entered into the new Year 2021, we present to you some highlights from the previous year through some stats:

  • Total 6 release: 5 from 17.12 series and 1 from 16.11 series
  • 273,144 lines of code changed through 1,483 commits for framework
  • 46,120 lines of code changed through 324 commits for plugins
  • 1,909 emails sent for 415 topics on the dev mailing list
  • 923 emails sent for 251 topics on the user mailing list
  • 748 issues closed while 801 new issues opened
  • 9 new PMC members and 4 new committers joined the community
  • The community had several virtual discussions & sessions demonstrating OFBiz capabilities. (Can be found at our official channel)
  • We have been reviving our social media presence on various platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook)
  • We are committed to resolving the maximum possible reported issues. Here is a graph showing the number of issues created vs. the number of issues resolved in the last 300 days: https://s.apache.org/dfh9r

Apache OFBiz 17.12.05 Released!

During this month the community announced the release of 17.12.05.
The new release consolidates all work done since the previous release in July 2020.

The release file can be downloaded following the
instructions on the Downloads page:
https://ofbiz.apache.org/download.html

Please refer to the Release Notes for more details of the changes introduced with this new version:
https://ofbiz.apache.org/release-notes-17.12.05.html

Please note that a security vulnerability has been reported for the previous releases. It is highly recommended that you upgrade to the 17.12.05 release to mitigate this vulnerability. 

New PMC Members

The OFBiz PMC has
invited Akash Jain, and Girish Vasmatkar to become new members of the
committee and we are glad to announce that they have accepted the
nomination. Please join us in welcoming and congratulating them for
their new role on the project, and also thanking them for all their
contributions.

OFBiz as OMS

The community discussed an action plan for the next videos in the series and concluded to pick the following topics next in the series:
- Order routing to the appropriate facility for fulfillment based on a defined strategy by the business
- Order splitting for faster fulfillment of available items on the order
- Fulfillment application to be used at Stores (BOSS - Buy Online Ship-to-Store)for picking, packing, and shipping Label
- Store inventory management
- Ease of managing most popular customer journeys across the channels like BOPIS (Buy Online and Pick in Store), BORIS (Buy Online Return in Store), and Endless Aisle.

Here is the link to the discussion:
https://youtu.be/irMkDxWdNzk

Here is the link to the playlist for all the discussions:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLobIkeUbRXqe7YKSOdrXTrbRlCa7xvyGe

If
you want to be part of this discussion and share your experiences, join the conversation
https://s.apache.org/nb9aj

Thanks Pranay Pandey for initiating it, Devanshu Vyas for taking it further, and to everyone who contributed to it.

User Stories - Interviews with users

With the thought to bring real user first-hand experience to the evaluators who come and validate OFBiz, we started a new playlist on OFBiz YouTube
channel named "User Stories - From the people who have put Apache OFBiz in action".

The first guest on this journey is Nicola Mazzoni - who was also a speaker at ApacheCon 2019.

Here is the link to the first episode on this list:
https://youtu.be/PLesfdlhrH4

Thank you so much Pranay Panday for this initiative and Nicola for sparing time, & sharing your experience with the community.

Statistics

Apache Kibble tracks some Apache OFBiz community statistics on its
demo instance, so we have highlighted a few of our stats for the last
month:

  • JIRA Issue Tracker: 49 issues were opened and 32 issues were closed ( 8 different people helped to close these issues)
  • Code Change and Commit Activity:
    • Framework: 45 commits to the code base that changed  lines of code ( 8 committers were active)
    • Plugins: 5 commits to the code base that changed 52 lines of code ( 2 committers were active)
  • Mailing Lists:
    • Dev: 33 emails sent and 23 topics discussed ( 18 different people)
    • User: 4 emails sent and 3 topics discussed ( 4 different people)

New features and improvements

Functional enhancements and improvements as well as updates of third party libraries and source code refactoring:

Framework

  • Updates copy right date (GitHub Link)
  • Changes inline style to js for multiple select field (OFBIZ-12115)
  • Applies CSS Grid to Find Orders (OFBIZ-12116)
  • Improves: Open Menu file from browser (OFBIZ-12119)
  • Addes support to calculate distance between two geo points (OFBIZ-11901)
  • MacroFormRenderer refactoring of label, display and text fields (GitHub Link)
  • Refactoring: Renames SCRIPT_LINKS_FOR_FOOT to SCRIPT_LINKS_FOR_BODY_END (GitHub Link)
  • Implementes: Access to the current screen from any widget element (OFBIZ-11809)
  • Renames MultiBlockHtmlTemplateUtil to ScriptLinkHelper (OFBIZ-12134)
  • Minor changes to reduce checkstyle warnings count (GitHub Link)
  • Decreases tasks.checkstyleMain.maxErrors from 286 to 279 (GitHub Link)
  • Removes deprecated ExpectedException.none from tests (GitHub Link)
  • Marks unused HTML renderers as deprecated (GitHub Link)
  • Improves: Don't log warning when ObjectType converts from String to String (GitHub Link)
  • Adds a framework method to get main webapp menu with the webapp name (OFBIZ-10601)
  • Adds extra classpath directories for ofbiz.tar/zip (GitHub Link)
  • Allows Unsafe Event Message (OFBIZ-12147)
  • Updates tasks.checkstyleMain.maxErrors to 278 (GitHub Link)
  • Improves description encoding in 2 classes: MacroFormRenderer and renderableFtlFormElementsBuilder (OFBIZ-12159)
  • Adds a SourceSet for groovyScript files specifying the classpath that should be used for compilation (GitHub Link)
  • Creates 'New Request' button should be removed from create new request screen in Order the component (OFBIZ-12121)
  • Updates German UiLabel in relation with entity QuantityBreak (OFBIZ-12146)
  • Corrects spelling error in the German translation of Slovakia (OFBIZ-12161)
  • Fixes a typo (GitHub Link)

Plugins

  • Updates code to fix no suitable method found for create(int) error (OFBIZ-12100)

Bugfixes

Functional and technical bugfixes:

Framework

  • Fixes: Open Screen file from browser (OFBIZ-12038)
  • Fixes: Issue starting ofbiz from tar distribution (OFBIZ-12118)
  • Fixes: Date picker not initialized in ajax-called form (OFBIZ-12097)
  • Fixes: Incorrect date format in tooltip (OFBIZ-12123)
  • Fixes: Creating a new Customer create a wrong record in CommunicationEvent (OFBIZ-12142)
  • Fixes: Terms are not shown correctly on the Invoice overview (OFBIZ-12139)
  • Fixes: Ampersand in Party not displayed correctly (OFBIZ-12140)
  • Fixes: Issue in rendering Comparitive balance sheet PDF and exporting the PDF for Cash Flow Statement displays the macro code for the date fields (OFBIZ-12151), (OFBIZ-12155)
  • Fixes: Use data url scheme for logo in CompanyHeader (GitHub Link)
  • Fixes: Possible NPE in DatabaseUtil.getColumnInfo(...) (OFBIZ-11385)