Welcoming all our new developers

About a month ago I inserted a post at Sourceforge, looking for developers to give a hand with CMapp. At that stage a buggy prelimiary version of CMapp had been released and I was under pressure with a second version. Since then, six new developers have signed up and are actively helping to develop CMapp further. The CMapp project no longer relies on simple .tar.gz snapshots, but now has a full working CVS repository on Sourceforge to really speed up and help team development.

I’m starting working on some project milestones for this and future CMapp releases. I’d like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to all the CMapp developers!

Added a contract type manager for admin

I just finished off a contract type manager today. This is basically a two-file routine which allows an administrator to add, modify and delete contract types. For those not familiar with CMapp, a contract type is a record from the database table “contract_types” – the record consists (basically) of a shortcut (such as “NDA”), an actual_name (such as “Non-Disclosure Agreement”) and a description of this contract type. Why is this useful? Before a contract manager adds a contract record to CMapp, he/she has to choose a contract type from a drop-down list. The drop-down list selects all contract types from the contract_types table in the database. Next to this drop-down list is a small info symbol. When the user clicks on this, a pop-up window opens and displays all the requisite information about contract types.

I think it’s worthwhile to add a further feature to the contract type manager – a kind of Google search field which searches the Internet for new contract types. This could help to build up a substantial database of information on contracts which would be beneficial for contract managers. Of course, this doesn’t take from the fact that contract managers can also request to have contract types added. Maybe we should create a script to do just this…

Just some general information

Hi everyone,

as this is the first post to the blog, here’s some general information about the project. First of all, the project is called CMapp, which stands for Contract Management Application (not to be confused with the infamous CMApp trojan ). CMapp has been in existence since August 2005 and is currently in version 0.2 (version 0.1 can be downloaded from Sourceforge but this is not recommended as it is a buggy release and is quite unfinished). OK – so much to the quick description – CMapp lives at http://cmapp.sourceforge.net and can be downloaded either from the Snapshot Repository on the homepage or, much better, from CVS.

CMapp intends to fill a gap in open source applications – there are only a couple of open source document management applications and none of them seem particularly suited to multi-user environments. CMapp intends to appeal to enterprises as well as to smaller businesses and individuals, which made it necessary to incorporate a database infrastructure (MySQL) as well as a server side language (PHP). Use of a server/client environment means that CMapp needs only be installed once (preferably on an Apache 2 server running on linux) and all users access it through their web browsers.

More information on CMapp is available from the homepage (there is even some developer’s documentation available, though this has to be expanded upon). If you are interested in finding out more, or, better still, in helping out, have a look at the Sourceforge project page and think about signing up on the mailing list.

Hope to hear from you soon

Ciaran

CMapp Maintainer