drbowen wrote on Monday, October 17, 2005:
Dear Ballards,
These are notes that occurred at a telephone conference for organizational purposes on 4-15-2005, I think this will help answer some of your questions about current development direction:
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Notes for Conference Call
04.15.05 at 6:15 p.m. EST
Main points addressed include:
Mission, Database design and standards, Directory tree layout, GACL, Calendar, Smarty, Patching, upgrading process, Documentation
Participants:
Andres Paglayan, Rod Roark, Chad Tipton, Tekkno Genius, Emily Killian, Sam Bowen
Guiding principles:
1.It will remain 100% free software under the GNU GPL
2.We will maintain a spirit of openness, kindness and cooperation
3.We will give back to the free software community
4.We will document our changes and improvements
5.We will not hide problems
6.We will not discriminate against persons or groups, subject to our focus on the field of medicine and we encourage the use of OpenEMR in other languages.
7.We will avoid needless complexity, to include software design, installation, maintenance and usability.
8.We will not use third-party tools without a compelling reason.
9.We want to encourage contributions from the community and will grant access to make changes in the source code based on demonstrated dependability.
10.With any change that affects the database, the contributor needs to write both a script to alter database and instructions on other things people will have to do in the form of a text file
General policy:
1.Contributors must make 1-2 meaningful contributions before they are granted full access to change code. Before that point, they should e-mail patches and code to one of the key developers for review.
2.Contributors will keep the copyright for their own contributions; however, it is recommended that they assign enforcement powers to the community.
3.The GNU GPL should be used for all licensing for consistency’s sake.
4.New additions should avoid using Smarty templating.
5.We will make the project more doctor-friendly via forms with lists and clicking, versus typing-intensive forms.
6.There will be a separate forms folder so that the main forms directory is not overpopulated with similar forms. There will be three classes of forms (those necessary for the system to work, forms that are popular and stable and other forms)
7.We will consider using Java script for selected items to spruce up usability
8.Everything should work in Firefox and we should strive to get everything to work with Internet Explorer because of that browser’s popularity.
Calendar:
1.The calendar needs to write into the database, instead of a hard drive (The same goes for scanning of documents.).
Logos:
1.We will use a new OpenEMR logo
New release:
1.Next release is due now
2.Developers should concentrate on fixing bugs until then.
3.We will include the mission as part of new releases.
Documentation:
1.Documentation will be funneled through Dr. Bowen (drbowen at charter dot net).
2.A goal is to have HTML references in OpenEMR point to corresponding points in the manual.
3.There will be a common repository for all help files.
Web site:
1.The repository will be on both Sourceforge and the project’s home page.
2.We will keep CVS at Sourceforge for now.
3.We will make oemr.org the registered domain name for the home page.
4.Dr. Bowen offered administrative access to the server and to the Postnuke Web page to Andres Paglayan, Rod Roark and Tekkno Genius.
5.Other people will be given access as the core community sees fit.
6.The repository will be kept under tighter control than the Web site.
Database design:
Coming soon
Directory tree layout:
Coming soon
PHP GACL model:
PHP GACL has been added.
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Personally I would love to get rid of frames. A lot of the newer HTML standards are nullified because of the use of frames. This is an architecture that we inherited from Synitech. It will be difficult to move to a modern architecture if we continue to use frames.
Up to this date no one has had the resources to rewrite without frames. As a group we should probably agree on the use the continued use frames or move to a newer standard such as W3C transitional HTML or strict HTML.
Sam Bowen
