Dolibarr is a powerful ERP with a very active developer community. Its growth is because it has a nurturing and active international network of partners that provide support in their respective countries.
Why should I use Dolibarr?
If you’ve reached this point, it’s probably because you’ve wondered, Why should you use Dolibarr?
Dolibarr is a powerful ERP and with a very powerful community of developers, especially because it has implemented a large network of partners internationally, which guarantee that it will continue to be so in the short term.
Dolibarr is a scalable application by installing and developing external modules, so if a functionality has not been developed, you can always ask one of the partners, or any experienced developer, to develop it for you.
You can try Dolibarr, and find additional information at the link below.
What is the future of Dolibarr?
As I said earlier, Dolibarr has a very active and productive community, but if they don’t plan an internal application change, it’s quite possible that in a few years it will be totally obsolete and impossible to maintain.
You may wonder… If it is as I say, how is it that they have not already considered this reform of the code?
To be honest, I do not actively participate in the community of Dolibarr, but carrying out a reform of this importance, presents a series of quite serious drawbacks … and very difficult to solve:
- Many entry points to the code, which can be a significant security breach.
- General disorganization, accompanied by a significant amount of duplicate code.
- Excessive use of global variables and almost zero use of object-oriented programming.
- Mix of controllers, models and views. Currently the code is practically monolithic.
- Calls to the database are made by direct commands against the server. Although it has a model structure, it is hardly actually used.
- The names of the tables and fields are a multicultural mix in several languages.
- The views are mixed with the rest of the code, costing a lot to keep track of what is done at each moment.
Reforming the code would mean that all modules developed by third parties would have to be rewritten to the new system, which may not seem feasible in the short term; on the other hand, not doing so makes it lose its appeal, to the point that its continuity may be endangered in the medium/long term if they do not remedy it, in my opinion.
What could they do to save Dolibarr?
What I’m going to do in my little free time, is to use Alxarafe, installing it on an existing installation of Dolibarr, and try that both can coexist, so that you can migrate to the new platform without losing the functionality of Dolibarr.
As I have repeated on several occasions, Dolibarr seems to me a phenomenal tool, and that is why I am interested in putting a solution to the problems I have detected.
Remember that the code will always be up-to-date in:
https://github.com/rsanjoseo/alxarafe
Remember that you can collaborate to make a more efficient code.
You will be able to follow all the improvements of the code in our blog.
Pull requests are always welcome
The original text is in Spanish, but there is a copy in English https://alxarafe.com