Drastic Code Changes

iamismu wrote on Wednesday, January 02, 2013:

Hi All,

I am new to OpenEMR and unfortunately i wasn’t as active as I should have in this forum as well.

My basic doubt is if we make considerable code changes and design changes to the OpenEMR 4.1.1 version, how would it affect us when say a new version of OpenEMR is released.

I would guess in that case, to upgrade my customized version would be very tedious.

Is there any easier option available?

Thanks,
Mohamed Ismail

capminds wrote on Wednesday, January 02, 2013:

Ismail,
            Welcome to OpenEMR community.

The code maintenance is depends upon the changes you are going to made in your OpenEMR, If you are made only small changes it would be easier to apply the upcoming patch in your OpenEMR, Other wise it becomes hard to maintain.Better you can use GIT for code revision,

Thanks,
Naina
emr@capminds.com
www.capminds.com

iamismu wrote on Wednesday, January 02, 2013:

Thanks a lot Naina for the quick response, even though it means lot of work for us since we may well be making considerable modification to the code

capminds wrote on Wednesday, January 02, 2013:

Ismail,
            FYI : If you maintain GIT properly,You can use OpenEMR patch for needed bug fixes(Not all) from community.please make sure that.As well please let us know for further help on OpenEMR  services

Naina
emr@capminds.com
www.capminds.com

bradymiller wrote on Wednesday, January 02, 2013:

Hi Ismail,

The best way to avoid diverging your code is to consider contributing your improvements to the official OpenEMR codebase; then the upgrading/patching will work out of the box (of course this decision is up to you).

Learning git is definitely helpful no matter what you do and there is a git OpenEMR tutorial here:
http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Git_for_dummies

thanks,
-brady
http://www.open-emr.org/

zhhealthcare wrote on Wednesday, January 02, 2013:

Ismail

One of the things that we at ZH Healthcare is doing is making a code with which you can install new modules that run with OpenEMR.  So, lets say, if you were to take the Calendar part and make substantial changes to it, you can code it as a separate Calendar module and run it with OpenEMR.  So you will essentially have the original Calendar code and the changes you made.

You might have seen such module installer in almost all open source products like Drupal and such. 

You dont need a module installer to do this.  You can take the approach of creating your modifications as another module even without the module installer.

This way you get to retain the changes you made.  Currently we are testing the module installer and will be contributing this code to the community.

Thanks
Shameem
ZH Healthcare