[Dolibarr-user] Happy new year and Dolibarr 3.0

[Laurent Destailleur (eldy)]

Hi every Dolibarr users and Dolibarr developers.

It's time for me to wish you an happy new year 2011 and to give you
fresh news about Dolibarr project.

The Dolibarr 3.0 version will start its beta step this week-end. A new
branch will be created. I think it should be last less than 1 or 2 month
because current development version looks to be already stable since now
1 month.
After beta step, a release candidate will be available (so on february I
think).

But start to develop 3.1 will be possible just after this week-end.
Nearly all important new features and fixes I planned for 3.0 are done
(See tasks with priority 9 on Savannah task manager:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?group=dolibarr), except feature to
build its own document templates using OpenOffice (will works on this
for 3.1). But a lot of features planned for 3.1 (see severity 7 in
Savannah task manager).
Version 3.0 has also very important enhancement for internationnal
users, that should open the "market" to important countries like
Germany, India, Grece, Russia and more. UTF8 is supported for PDF
generation (Only Chinese and Japane languages are not yet supported) and
options was added to comply with nearly most countries in the world,
even if there is still works to do for Canada and USA.

I planned to present Dolibarr to the FOSDEM.
But FOSDEM has not planned enought spaces for OpenSource project, so
FOSDEM guy could not accept Dolibarr into the project room. Only 10
project will be present, that is a little bit disappointing and make
FOSDEM a not "so important" congress. So I'm afraid Dolibarr will not be
visible this year at FOSDEM. May be next year. The french "Solution
Linux" into Paris that is a more representative event for OpenSource
projects will be our priority.


Dolibarr is now a very popular tool, so thi means there is also a lot of
requirement to add feature. This is a good news but also a danger. This
year, i will try to keep the same direction than past years:
Adding features step by step, because priority is to keep Dolibarr a
good software complying with the 3S rule:
Simple to install
Simple to use
Simple to develop



Your Dolibarr core team project leader,
Laurent Destailleur, alias Eldy


PS: Also, don't forget you can subscribe to be a member of the Dolibarr
foundation to help Dolibarr project.
Step to do this is here:
http://www.dolibarr.org/foundation