Hello Everyone!
I know I haven’t posted for ages, but I promise I’ve still been working on Frontmin. I really want to start using it myself and I know other people do too. I previously was using WHMCS but surprisingly it does not yet work on PHP7, though their support has assured me it is in the works. I am out of a billing panel until I get Frontmin done now. I don’t want to mess with multiple PHP versions just for it. Oddly, all the free software used on dozens of websites seems to work fine on PHP7, only the software I actually paid for doesn’t work. Go figure.
We’ve decided to use WooCommerce to power the e-commerce side of things. This way we can use all the features it contains already including all the built-in payment processors as well as any additional plugins. There are so many plugins out there to add additional functionality to WooCommerce it just makes sense to use it rather than coding something from scratch.
One of the things I wanted to do was allow invoicing for not only websites to be automatically created in Virtualmin but also for services such as charging an hourly wage for work done. In order to do this in WooCommerce you can create a product for 1 hour and then create an order with that product and set a quantity for that product. You can then edit that entry on the order and click the Add Meta button to enter a title and description for that time worked. Then you can add another product to the order and do it again if you want.
However I have to add the ability to enter product quantities as a decimal place because WooCommerce doesn’t handle this very well, and in fact seems to get messed up when I try to enter a value with a decimal because for some reason it adjusts the cost of the product for that entry and it just doesn’t do things properly. There was at least one plugin that already allows you to use decimal places for the quantity but I’m going to implement an option for it directly into Frontmin. I don’t want people to have to install 27 different plugins just to use Frontmin as it’s intended to be used. But that won’t stop you from customizing your site however you like with any of the plugins that happen to be out there. For example, if you want PDF invoices, there are plugins for that. If you want to use a different payment provider there is likely a plugin out there somewhere for it.
Currently I’m working with PHP7 and attempting to get Frontmin running on there. It will also be tested on older versions of PHP, or at least PHP 5.6 and/or whatever versions of PHP are still supported by the time Frontmin gets released.
Another thing I’ve just done is switch from using NetBeans to using PhpStorm and integrated it with Bugzilla so I can track my tasks. Plus NetBeans didn’t seem to support PHP7 yet. I’m very impressed with PhpStorm! I highly recommend checking it out if you do any coding in PHP. They also have software for several other popular languages and a lot of other things too. I did setup their YouTrack issue tracking software and it was quite nice as well. Unfortunately it uses Java and it was a sad choice but I didn’t really want it taking up all my system resources, but I wanted a tracker I can host on my own server. I tested out several others along the way as well including Phabricator, GitLab, and even BitBucket but I think I’m going to settle on Bugzilla for now because it does everything I want and seems to integrate with PhpStorm fine enough for me. I don’t want to waste anymore time messing with trackers.
So I guess this is about all I have for now. I’m off to explore PhpStorm further and get the rest of my setup migrated over including my composer setup which hopefully is just a matter of setting some options somewhere. I have composer setup to update all the 3rd party libraries including WordPress so it’s kind of essential.
Ryan