schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

SIELibre, LLC has released SchoolTool 2.8.4, a bugfix release of our free
student information system.  This release addresses two issues:

1432672 -- report cards omitting grades under certain circumstances;
1436881 -- comment dialog not working with certain browsers.

The standard upgrade procedure applies.  You must be using the 2.8 PPA in
Launchpad to receive this update.  See:

http://book.schooltool.org/install-2_0.html#upgrading-schooltool


SchoolTool News

Mark Shuttleworth began the SchoolTool project over 10 years ago and was
the primary funder of development through the end of 2014.  SIELibre, LLC,
comprised of longtime project manager Tom Hoffman and lead developer
Douglas Cerna, has now successfully continued support and development of
SchoolTool on a commercial basis for six months, with good prospects for
continuing this work indefinitely.

In particular we have been working with a London-based charity, Absolute
Return for Kids (ARK), on pilot deployments in Uganda and India.  They have
funded a number of features that will be in upcoming SchoolTool releases.

While the good news is that we have remained busy working on SchoolTool,
the bad news is that we are stuck in a classic dilemma for commercial
businesses managing open source projects.  We have not had time to do the
(unpaid) work of packaging a major feature release.  We were hoping to put
out SchoolTool 3.0 close to the beginning of the year.  Now it is July, and
we have a number of paid projects queuing up for release before the
beginning of the Northern Hemisphere school year.

We need to dedicate a solid two to three weeks of work to do a round of
further bug fixing and merge the new features into a solid new release.
Thus, we will probably be well into fall (October/November) before we will
be able to release SchoolTool 3.0.

More details on SchoolTool 3.0 will follow as we get closer, but the
biggest new features are a completely redesigned “School” page, which
streamlines common tasks considerably; and a fee tracking system.

Cheers,
Tom Hoffman
Managing Partner
SIELibre, LLC
http://sielibre.com