RELEASE NOTES LedgerSMB 1.2.14 1: Welcome to LedgerSMB LedgerSMB is an accounting and ERP program initially aimed at small to midsize businesses. Currently the financials and supply chain management modules are fairly complete, while other modules such as project management exist in a rudamentary form. The initial features are identical to SQL-Ledger 2.6.17 from which it was derived, but the feature set is starting to diverge rapidly. 1.1 System Requirements: * Perl 5.8. * Apache, IIS, or other web server that supports CGI. * PostgreSQL 8.0 or higher. 7.3 and 7.4 could be supported with some effort but will not work out of the box. 8.3 is expected to raise issues but they will be corrected as we become aware of the problems. * Any operating system that supports the above environment. * The following CPAN modules: * Data::Dumper * Locale::Maketext * Locale::Maketext::Lexicon * MIME::Base64 * Digest::MD5 * HTML::Entities * DBI * DBD::Pg * Math::BigFloat * IO::File * Encode * Locale::Country * Locale::Language * Time::Local * Cwd * Config::Std * MIME::Lite 2: What's New in 1.2? 2.1: Database changes: All core tables now have defined primary keys. This allows Slony-I to be supported out of the box. Chris Browne has contributed a setup script for Slony. It is in the utils/replication directory. Also all user information has been moved into the database and the password algorythm has been changed from crypt to md5. This means that users will need to convert their accounts prior to first login on the new system (if this is an upgrade). Also now the defaults table has moved from a one column per value structure to a simple key->value structure. 2.2: Security LedgerSMB 1.2 has been through a detailed SQL injection audit of the codebase inherited from SQL-Ledger. As a result several vulnerabilities which were known to be exploitable were corrected along with hundreds of places where vulnerabilities may have been exploitable but we didn't have time to verify the what was involved in exploiting it. We believe though that many or most of the issues were exploitable given a little time and effort. Also, we discovered the template editor's security system was moved from blacklisting to whitelisting, eliminating a whole class of possible security issues. 2.3: New Features in 1.2.x Metatron Technology Consulting's SL-POS codebase was merged with this project, providing a framework for POS hardware support and more. Online credit card processing support has been added. LSMB now supports an arbitrary number of defined currencies for a business and is no longer limited to 3. 2.4: Localization Changes Localization functions now use Gettext .po files on all platforms. This means that standard translation management tools will work with LSMB translations. 2.5: Other changes The ledger-smb.conf is now an inifile which will reduce the level of expertise necessary to configure it for non-Perl users. 3: Known Issues 3.1: Reposting Invoices: Reposting invoices is known to cause inaccuracies cost of goods sold and inventory accounts. This problem has been confirmed to affect SQL-Ledger 2.6.x as well and is caused by problems involving the de-allocation and trasaction reversal routines. It will be corrected (by removing the ability to truly repost invoices) in an upcoming version as we continue to re-engineer the application. Additionally there is a known issue where reposting invoices more than once causes a primary key issue on the transactions table. A fix for this is distributed in sql/fixes. 3.2: Tax rate changes LedgerSMB 1.2.x's database structure does not handle tax rate changes properly. A fix for this is in the sql/fixes directory. 3.3: Warehouse Tracking LedgerSMB inherited an issue from SQL-Ledger where a shipped sales order deletes all known shipping information. There is a fix for this in the sql/fixes directory. 3.4: Recurring transactions LedgerSMB's database structure does not handle certain areas properly regarding recurring transactions. A fix for this issue is in the sql/fixes directory. 3.5: AR/AP Transactions LedgerSMB from 1.2.0 through 1.2.13 had a bug which saved incorrect summary information for AR and AP transactions (but not invoices). A fix for this has been included in sql/fixes and new transactions are not affected as of 1.2.14. 4: Differences between LedgerSMB and SQL-Ledger(TM) 4.1: Login name restrictions Logins in SQL-Ledger can contain any printable characters. In LedgerSMB these are restricted to alphanumeric characters and the symbols ., @, and -. 4.2: Session handling SQL-Ledger as of 2.6.17 used session tokens for authentication. These tokens are based on the current timestamp and therefore insecure. Furthermore, these tokens are not tracked on the server, so one can easily forge credentials for either the main application or the administrative interface. While this was corrected in 2.6.18, the solutions chosen by SQL-Ledger (caching the crypted password by the browser) is not in line with commonly accepted best security practices. LedgerSMB stores the sessions in the database. These are generated as md5 sums of random numbers and are believed to be reasonably secure. The sessions time out after a period of inactivity. In the initial release both SQL-Ledger-style session ID's and the newer version were required to access the application. In newer versions, the SQL-Ledger style session ID's have been removed. 4.3: Database Changes Under certain circumstances where the Chart of Accounts is improperly modified, it is possible to post transactions such that a portion of the transaction is put into a NULL account. LedgerSMB does not allow NULL values in the chart id field of the transaction. Also, the transaction amount has been changed from FLOAT to NUMERIC so that arbitrary precision mathematics can be used in third party reports. This ought to also allow SQL-Ledger to properly scale up better as SUM operations on floating points are unsafe for large numbers of records where accounting data is involved. 5: Roadmap This project has no defined roadmap but rather a set of statements and objectives contained in the documentation manager and trackers of sourceforge. In general, our development is focused around the following principles: * LSMB as infrastructure: LSMB should be accessible from other applications. * Universal applicability: LSMB should be usable by any any business and should always do the right thing in the background. Businesses should never find that they have outgrown the software. * Focus on Small to Midsize Businesses: LSMB's core market will remain in the small to midsize market. 6: Get Involved Contributors should start by joining the LedgerSMB users and devel lists. Code contributions at the moment must be committed by either project maintainer and should be submitted either using the patches interface at Sourceforge or the devel mailing lists. Additionally, we can use help in QA, documentation, advocacy, and many other places. SQL-Ledger is a registered trademark of DWS systems and is not affiliated with this project or its members in any way. DEPRECATIONS: ============================= The entire set of Perl modules and database structures should be seen as deprecated from the perspective of add-on development. For advice in making add-ons as upgrade-safe as possible, please email the -devel list. Please include a description of what you are trying to accomplish. KNOWN ISSUES: ============================== The POS printing system gives an access denied message because the printer triggers the directory transversal checks. To work around this problem, ensure that you do not need to use absolute paths for the printer program (use lpr or put netdirect.pl in /usr/local/bin and reference without the full path). Also the POS system requires some additional configuration both in the chart of accounts and in the system itself. Please edit the pos.conf.pl and create appropriate till accounts. Bugs Fixed in 1.2.6: ================================ 1) Customer_id field not found error when posting AP transaction. This error was caused by a mistake in the performance optimizations made in 1.2.5. 2) Erroneous headers printed to balance sheet and income statement. 3) Meta tags were added to force UTF-8 charsets, fixing occasional display issues with multibyte characters where Apache was misconfigured. 4) ledgersmb-httpd.conf is now more internally consistant. The alias directive was changed to /ledgersmb (from /ledger-smb). 5) Minor html fixes were added to ca.pl, contributed by Donna Robertson 6) Error when searching for customer by address is corrected. 7) Invalid format for integer error fixed when saving projects unconnected to customers. None of the above fixes involved changes to API's that are widely used by the application. Impacts elsewhere from these bug fixes should be minimal. 8) Unbound placeholder error when saving items with custom fields. This error involved a centrally used API that is invoked when custom fields exist. The fix is only likely to affect those installations which have custom fields attached to orders, invoices, or parts.