Re: [phpGroupWare-users] Various issues

[Chris Weiss]

I can answer some of this...

On 6/24/07, James Mohr wrote:
> I am running 0.9.16.011.
>
> I have another post "Must login again to show default application", which has 
> not yet be answered.

had to approve you on the email list, it is answered now.

> Is there a portal start page like Horde? 
> http://www.horde.org/groupware/screenshots/portal.png

each app has the ability to add a "home page" widget, so yes.
However, few apps have one, but calendar, email, and todo do..

> Is there anyway to synchronize PHPGW with a handheld? The phpgwinfo site says "The 
> SyncML Server module will allow synchronization". That is future tense. All the 
> other references I have googled said things about the future. Is there somethung 
> currently available?

there is the "sync" module that requires and old version of Sync4J and
has some issues.  We also have a Google Sumer of Code student
currently working on a native php implementation that be more usable.
Hopefully he'll make good progress.

> There is an option to setup email authentication, but other than the setup 
> page, I cannot find any reference to it in the PHPGW doc.

"email auth" in setup refers to phpgw authing users against the email
server in order to dynamically create phpgw accounts for valid mail
users.  If you are thinking of SMTP auth, that currently has to be
done in code and is documented on the forum.

> The online manual says "Note: Some of this information is out of date". This 
> has been in there as long as I have known about phpGroupware. What is out of date? Is it 
> still valid?

The manual is done in a odd way that makes it difficult for developers
to update and so they don't update it.  The person that wrote it
initialy said this would be change and has long since left the
project.

> When selecting InfoLog, I get: "Path to user and group files HAS TO BE OUTSIDE of the webservers 
> document-root". I Googled and searched the forums, but found nothing useful. If this is the very first error 
> message the app spits out, it should be documented, especially since it is fatal.  In the setup, there is a a block 
> "Path information". this is set to something "OUTSIDE of the webservers document-root" and has 
> perms 777. I changed the Infolog code to display the path it finds for files_dir and it shows /var/www/phpgwfiles where 
> it is supposed to be and it is defintely "OUTSIDE of the webservers document-root".

this isn't just infolog.  the install howto linked from the download
page has an entire section dedicated to this topic.  If you installed
phpgw, you really should have been following this howto.

> Admin->Notes->Preferences gives me a blank page.

I've heard of this happening on a some redhat servers, but no one has
been able to figure out why, mostly because none of the developers
have been able to reproduce.  I'm pretty sure there's an open bug on
it.

> My two cents: get the documentation up-to-date and complete, then deal with new features. If you are going to 
> describe it with anything like "enterprise" drop the applications like "comic" and DJ 
> from the core set. If these are the apps that the developers consider "important", you will have a 
> hard time convincing most managers that the product is enterpris anything.

the only "core" apps are addressbook, calendar, email, todo and notes.
Most everything else in the tarball are just "supported" apps, though
not necessarily supported by the core team.  Some apps are there
because when we tried to remove them due to being unsupported, users
complained.   I can't speak for comic and DJ, I'm pretty sure DJ was
never "supported".

> I would like to hear from someone "official" about the phpgroupware/egroupware 
> split. Offline is OK, but I would like a little something I can print.

it's fairly well documented on the mailing lists, definitely not a secret.
We are GNU project, which adds some restrictions to what 3rd party
code we can include in our tarball.  The guys that forked to egw had
repeatedly committed code with GPL-incompatible licenses to our CVS
with long explanations and and discussions each time.  At in least one
case, one guy even changed the license header of someone else's code.
They were threated to have CVS access removed if they could not follow
the guidelines, and copyright law for that matter, since they were all
present and agreed when we assigned copyright to the USA division of
the Free Source Foundation and were granted GNU project status.  Their
response was to fork, and being in Germany they were less at risk
legally due to different copyright law.