BambooInvoice 0.84 released : DerekAllard.com

BambooInvoice 0.84 released

April 09^th, 2008

Just like the title says, BambooInvoice 0.8.4 is “out the door”. I’ve upgraded all the application queries to take advantage of the new CodeIgniter Active Record improvements, and squashed a lot of bugs on the way. The changelog is pretty small, but a lot of work went into it.

As I wrote a few days ago about the future of BambooInvoice I think this reduces any lingering bugs down to about none. I’ve also introduced a few additional error catches, and I’ve tried to make a few error messages more helpful. The next version of Bamboo will focus on finishing off features that I want to see, and will probably be a full point update (0.9) and then the real work starts, with what will amount to a code overhaul. That stuff won’t happen until at least summer, but if you are an “end user” you probably wouldn’t ever notice it anyhow. It’ll be “under the hood” type stuff that programmers obsess with ;)

If you have any specific features you want to see, by all means please comment!

This entry was made on April 09^th, 2008 @ 22:01 and filed into BambooInvoice.

Comments

shaun wrote on April 10^th, 2008 @ 2:01

wooo! amped to check it out!

one small thing though: your blog, the bamboo site, and bamboo itself, don’t set their body background-colors.

My browser defaults to grey (to catch this kind of thing), and they all look a bit wonky against grey.

I know that most browsers default to white, but it makes sense to explicitly set it if the design requires it.

Nit-picky I know!

Derek Allard wrote on April 10^th, 2008 @ 5:23

Thanks Shaun, its a small thing, and worth changing. Especially on the heels of CSS naked day ;)

louis w wrote on April 10^th, 2008 @ 6:04

Nice to hear about the improvements. Bamboo is a great app which fit right into what i was looking for - and it runs off CI!

What kind of improvements were made to the AR class in CI? I did not hear about anything being done to this.

Derek Allard wrote on April 13^th, 2008 @ 7:16

Louis, yup, you’ll see them in the CodeIgniter changelog. Mostly around table prefixes and a slew of new AR functions like select_max(), etc.

David Lundquist wrote on April 29^th, 2008 @ 4:44

Hey, I just downloaded your bamboo invoice and really like your efforts thus far.
Im having a few issues, (PDF, and EMAIL end up at blank screens. So i went to investigate your DB Model.
Two questions:
1. Why did you choose to use MyIsam instead of InnoDb (I have concerns about not having enforced relationships on an invoice system.)
2. In your contacts table I have noted that you have the Administration users in the same contacts table as the customer’s. Was there a reason for this? Personally I feel a seperate table would have been a better approach, but I would like to know your reasoning before I do anything to the schema.

Derek wrote on April 29^th, 2008 @ 5:25

Why did you choose to use MyIsam instead of InnoDb (I have concerns about not having enforced relationships on an invoice system.)

It was almost an accident. Bamboo does not need MyIsam, and that has been removed from future Bamboo versions. The reason it is there is that an early adopter with Bamboo had a database that was f**king up innoDB tables somehow, but that’s what they were defaulting to. Rather then try to deal with an incompetant webhost, I simply gave him (I think it was a him) the SQL that generated MyIsam. After that, I left it in there in case I encountered another host like that, but last week I decided to remove it. Feel free to use any table type you like, Bamboo doesn’t care.

In your contacts table I have noted that you have the Administration users in the same contacts table as the customer’s. Was there a reason for this? Personally I feel a seperate table would have been a better approach, but I would like to know your reasoning before I do anything to the schema.

I was just the most convenient. Down the road I want to let customers login and view their invoices, and not only admins, so it seemed logical to have them all grouped. Let me turn this one around on you… why do you feel that a separate table would have been a better approach?

Andrew wrote on May 12^th, 2008 @ 3:53

Hi Derek.
Great piece of software!
Some feature requests:
Recurring Invoices
Invoice Reminders
Better invoices: Needs 2 subtract paid amounts from total. etc.

Maybe you can create a Post on the forum and start building a feature list.

Derek wrote on May 12^th, 2008 @ 5:11

Thanks Andrew. There’s an entire forum devoted to feature requests, so I probably won’t open a new thread.

I appreciate the kind words! Perhaps you could start a thread and elaborate on what you mean by “invoice reminders”? There are many ways to implement that for sure.

Look forward to reading about it on the BabmooInvoice forums!

DerekAllard.com : CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, and the World of Web Design

BambooInvoice 0.84 released

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