NextCode

screaming · Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 5

Hey there, Vlad! Great program you have here! I've been looking for a decent package to allow me to work on my finances through a web page and yours came up in my search. I'm impressed with the style and thought that went into it, especially in the area of the graphs!

I've spent this past weekend working out some things that I think are improvements.. I'd like to send them off to you, if you're interested.

- Fixed bugs, especially when there weren't any records
- Added budget tracking (to allow you to compare a budget with actuals)
- Redesigned the table infrastructure to use four tables only. This is a little more complicated than the way you had it set up but it lets you compare different groups easier, I think.
- Added proper categories. Now you have a Group with multiple Categories underneath it, as opposed to the "old" way where categories were global.. didn't make much sense to me.
- Seperated the interface for adding entries and managing the groups/categories
- Added Screen, File, and Email output methods for both the database backup and csv/ofx exports instead of just editing the tmp file on the filesystem (however, now you're required to create a 'cache' dir.. this will come in handy though later on).
- It works with register_globals=Off!
- Beefed up the error handling a little bit to add errors during page processing.
- Added a bunch of javascript to make the UI a little cleaner.

TODO:
- Im adding jpgraph now since I want to start graphing my budgets->actuals.
- javascript needs some testing in Internet Explorer. I use Firefox through-and-through and I haven't gotten around to firing up IE yet.
- I think I messed up the multi-currency thing.. oops.
- CSS-ify all the layout stuff
- Make it xhtml compliant.

Unfortunately I rewrote about 80% of PHPFinance :( There is still some recognizable "legacy" code in here though.

Thanks again for your hard work!

-Steve.

Vlad Alexa Mancini · Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 303

sounds to me like you might want to be a developer given the amount of work you done

however if i want to further work on the aplication myself i can not have someone change so many things like you did or it would be just as with phpfinance where Marco took over as i can not really work on the changes he made whithout examining every each one of them

if you are planning to do sustained work on this however maybe i can trunk out a separate release series which would be yours

however changes which are bugfixes and not features or improvments i would surely want to merge with my releases

screaming · Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 5

Vlad: Thanks for the reply!

I'm not sure I'm ready to take this on in a support context, but I'm willing to do what I can to help you out.

Thinking off the top of my head there are two bugs that I found. There may be more, but it just seems like so long ago since I started with PHPfinance ;)

- When there aren't any entries the index page with the charts and graphs barfs pretty bad.. mostly about invalid parameters (it turns out that you don't check to see if a var is an array before you call array-specific functions). The simple fix was to add a bunch of

if (is_array($var)) {}

statements in index.php and inc.graph.php.

- Security is a big deal for me, especially where this could house my financial data and by nature is accessible anywhere since it's a webpage. When I had more than one install of phpfinance on my server, I was able to switch between them without being prompted for a password. Once $_SESSION['logged'] was set in one version, it was set in the other (since the web server is the same hostname, the session variables carried). My fix for this was a little more involved because I'm using more of my modifications.

You can check it out here, if you like... but a lot of the modifications i did are on the back end so you may not be so impressed ;)

http://freda.bluecamel.org/phpfinance/index.php

(use firefox!)

DONE:
- moved all possible config to the database. This will make it easier to have a config page where you can add/remove currencies, and change exchange rates online. Also, it helped out a lot with the security fix (see above).
- Added JpGraph. I'm not sure if I'm graphing correctly though.. there's likely problems in the graphic routines.

TODO:
- make a setup page for first timers
- make a config page for configuring phpfinance settings
- I added jpgraph, now I just need to come up with something useful to graph ;)
- javascript needs some testing in Internet Explorer. I use Firefox through-and-through and I haven't gotten around to firing up IE yet.
- I think I messed up the multi-currency thing.. oops.
- CSS-ify all the layout stuff
- Make it xhtml compliant

Alright, I added a config page but now I'd like to add an icon? Your icons look familiar.. Did you make them?

Vlad Alexa Mancini · Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 303

data checking was not important to me so i left it for later , i should fix that when i will start working on fine tweaking the graphs

security issues however are not that trivial , i should look into that soon

you forgot to tell me the password for your demo

some of the icons are by me , most of them are from firefox and from the net , here are two you might need

screaming · Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 5

Vlad Alexa Mancini wrote: you forgot to tell me the password for your demo

Sorry, no password (it's blank).

Thanks for the icons!

-Steve.

Vlad Alexa Mancini · Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 303

i had tried entering no password but still i can not login
either way , thanks a lot , i had used some of your sugestions in the new release i just made

WedgeTalon · Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 1

screaming - I would be interested in seeing your code. If you ever come back and see this, message me :)

screaming · Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 5

Here are my modifications, minus the jpgraph directory under phpfinance/lib (it was too big to post without it).

screaming · Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 5

If you're interested in the new stuff, let me know and I can zip em up.

- reimplemented the report module and made it more generic, to ease in extending it with more reports.
- started AJAX-ifying the interface. The report module uses it extensively. (try dragging-and-dropping the categories on the reports)
- Made a report editor page
- started using jpgraph more to do the graphs. I have no preference here, just that jpgraph seems to do the job easily enough.

It seems like i didn't do much, but oh my, that pivot option took 4 days!

You can see here (password is "pass"):

http://freda.bluecamel.org/phpfinance/index.php

x81kilo · Joined: 11 Dec 2003 Posts: 2

WOW!!

I see that there are some developers out there modifying some major code, one aspect one would consider (suggestion) is the possibility of adding multiple users profiles so that i.e. a tax person can utilize this program, and have multiple users (clients) submit their expenses online. this kind of adaptation would skyrocket for this program by milestones ahead of anything in the open source community.

Perhaps we can get some help from these developers that are using this sw??

Requesting Kindly, Begging Mostly......

:-D Thanks in Advance.
::x81kilo