Latest Blog

In current versions of Plone, it is quite easy to extend existing features for various uses cases. One of the most powerful features is saved searches (called Collections), which provides end users to easily generate their own results based on different criteria.

This is then combined with end user selectable views, which are easily added via Zope3 views by developers. You can imagine the possibilities for the content manager:

• Thumbnail views based on tags
• News listings
• Blog listings
• Table lists
• Calendar Views

The last one is very useful for Intranets, since a lot of content are events based. For example, a standard Leave content form would have start and end dates. If we register them as Event types, they can be treated as such (beauty of component based architecture). So if if have a collection of all Leave forms that are in workflow state "Approved", you can then have auto generated calendar views of when people are on leave. By department, by team (pick users), by type eg. sick, or annual etc.

The most powerful of these calendar views is p4a.plonecalendar that provides folders and collections with Day, Week, Monthly and list views of event type items. dateable.chronos is the view package which provides standard views.

Plone views are based on Zope Page Templates (ZPT), that provides a very powerful XHTML compliant template system. Once you get a hang of it, it's quite easy to create your own custom views, often with extra fields that are not part of the default views. For example, our Leave form, maybe you want to show what type of leave it is, or even the name of the person.

<browser:page
 name="month.html"
 for="dateable.chronos.interfaces.ICalendarEnhanced"
 permission="dateable.chronos.ViewContent"
 class="dateable.chronos.browser.month.MonthView"
 template="month.pt"
 layer=".interfaces.IThemeSpecific"
 />

...

<a href="#" tal:attributes="href dayurl"><span tal:content="day/day" /></a>
<tal:block repeat="display
python:view.getOccurrenceDisplays(day)">

<tal:block tal:define="event_obj display/event/context/getObject;
                       start_time

...

<a tal:attributes="href display/url"
    tal:condition="display/viewable">
     <tal:block replace="event_obj/title" />
     <span class="location"
         tal:content="event_obj/location |
         nothing" />
     <span class="location" tal:content="event_obj/mission_event_location
     | nothing" />
</a>

<browser:page
name="list.html"
for="dateable.chronos.interfaces.ICalendarEnhanced"
permission="dateable.chronos.ViewContent"
class=".events.MyOwnEventListingView"
attribute="upcomingEvents"
layer=".interfaces.IThemeSpecific"
/>

<browser:page
name="past.html"
for="dateable.chronos.interfaces.ICalendarEnhanced"
permission="dateable.chronos.ViewContent"
class=".events.MyOwnEventListingView"
attribute="pastEvents"
layer=".interfaces.IThemeSpecific"
/>

from dateable.chronos.browser.month import MonthView as BaseMonthView
from dateable.chronos.browser.month import cmp_occurrence
from dateable.chronos.browser.events import EventListingView
import calendar
import datetime
from dateable import kalends

try:
    from Products.Five.browser.pagetemplatefile import \
         ZopeTwoPageTemplateFile as PageTemplateFile
except ImportError:
    from zope.pagetemplate.pagetemplatefile import PageTemplateFile

class MyOwnEventListingView (EventListingView):
    """
    """

    eventlist = PageTemplateFile('events.pt')

We use GnuCash for our small business accounting needs. So far it does the job well, including managing payroll. It treats payroll as accounting items so at this time it doesn't scale well if you have a lot of employees. For small business with say 5-10 employees, once you've set up the splits, it's quick using the duplicate feature at the end of each month to process everybody's monthly checks complete with compulsory EPF (superannuation) and SOCSO (workers insurance) payments.

Here's how you set it up to pay your employee for a Malaysian business. The on-line manual provides enough information for you to understand what you need to do.

Basically you need to have:

• Basic Salary
  
• Pay Net Salary (Your pay check basically, after EPF/SOCSO deductions + allowances)
  
• Other allowances (It's good to separate these out as some are tax deductable. We have communications and child care allowances.)
  
• EPF Employee Contribution
• EPF Employer Contribution
• SOCSO Employer Contribution
• SOCSO Employee Contribution

The accounts you need to have are:

• Assets
• Current Account
  
• Liability
  The company has to pay the relevant government agencies these amounts:
  
• EPF Employer Contribution
• EPF Employee Contribution
• SOCSO Employer Contribution
• SOCSO Employee Contribution
• Expenses
  These are expenses on top of the salary for the company. The employee deductions are reflected in their net salary, it's sort of an expense/investment for them but does not need to be reflected in company accounts.
  
• EPF Employer Contribution
• SOCSO Employer Contribution
• Payroll
• Base Salary
• Allowances (and other financial benefits)

I tend to do the entries in the current account, since that's where all the money is going in and out. So the entry with splits looks like this for an employee who earns basic salary of RM3,000 with a communications allowance. It's a bit weird with splits, in that the headings don't change if you're in the current account, so it's not obvious for example whether it's an increase or decrease for liability and expense accounts. It will show correctly if you view the entry in the Liabilities account (which is reversed). The good thing is that being a double entry system, all of this has to balance even for the split totals. If you get an imbalance, there is something wrong somewhere such as an expense in the wrong column or wrong value. This also applies to the other accounts, and you can check whether the right amounts have been paid to the respective agencies.

Notes:

• EPF Contributions are based on current rates of 12% Employer and 8% Employee from base salary.
• SOCSO Contributions are based on fixed current rates for RM3,000/mo and above.

Both of these government agencies are extremely friendly and helpful to small businesses. If you have any questions, they're more than willing to help. They also have booklets and such to guide you when you first register.

You only need to set this once. Later you can just duplicate the entry for existing employee, and adjust for a new one.

The only missing thing is a pay slip, which is often needed in Malaysia to prove income for employees applying for loans and such. Currently doing this with OpenOffice.org spreadsheet, another essential FOSS desktop application a business needs.

Services and Solutions

With the updated the website, you should now be able to find quickly all the services and solutions we provide. We specialize in Plone, but do contact us if you have specific development and training needs, especially for large organizations with multiple departments. We're also familiar with working remotely supporting clients in Bangkok, New Delhi and Incheon.

FOSS Community

Although we're not doing enough yet in terms of upstream participation, we try to do our best with sending patches, documentation and modules. Here are some of our Plone contributions:

• Two Level Navigation in Plone 3 (howto)
• Collection Portlet Multiview which extends the standard collection portlet with a few additional views and allows you to easily extend it with your own.
• Lithium Theme for Plone

A more flexible FOSS only working environment also allows us to contribute to other projects in our individual capacity.

• FOSS.my
• FOSS.org.my and related community sites and lists such as Planet MyOSS (where you will find our personal blogs), FossChix.my
• Fedora Malaysia
• UNDP's APDIP.net archives

We hope we can continue to improve and do well this year, which would mean we can be more supportive of local and upstream communities.