Those are just my first steps in Owl, and hereby are some points I think can be improved:

1) You can't delete a user/group, except via the database. You can disable one, but not delete. (Or at least it's not obvious how to do it)

2) At the document types, it's not possible to add a date-field, time-field, a combination or a currency-field (being a double with "%0.2f" precision, with a currency symbol before/after it).

3) More help would certainly be very ... helpfull ... For example when you hover over a header item in the admin module, it'd be nice if a small tooltip comes up and tells you what it's used for.

4) Why isn't there OCR for pictures? I mean, there are a lot of open source OCR engines out there, you could just use such one no? (for example tesseract is rather ok already).

5) After creating a group, owl goes back to editing the first user in the dropdown box.

6) When I search for for example 'license' (which is in the wordidx table, and linked to a document), owl cannot find any document? That's just weird.

7) Why is every column in 'prefs' another preference? I think it's much better (and readable) to have 1 column 'key' and 1 column 'value'. You just create a prefs class which does all the initializations and you're ready - with an easy to read table layout ;).

8) Why only allow SMTP to send mail? At my mac-server, this method fails (I don't really know why, but it keeps spawning errors). If I uncomment everything in the phpmailer class where the SMTPSend() function is called, and choose the sendmail sending function instead, everything works perfectly.

9) If you would use Smarty to seperate the logic (php) from the design (tpl), the code would be a lot better to read. Not that it's ugly written or so - far from that, but putting HTML code inside PHP code is just a bad practice ;).

10) Same goes for all the SQL queries, seperating them into 1 database class would make it more easy for you to update your code at a later time.

*) Last but not least, the Documents view is way too cluttered. It's ok for a computer savy guy like me, but for end-users it's very confusing. Clean it up and you have a killer product!


Greetz :)

Those are just my first steps in Owl, and hereby are some points I think can be improved:

1) If you select the group, and edit the group, the "Change" "Delete Group" "Rest"

2) Yes true, Could be added. Was never requested before, so was never added.

3) Yes MORE help and more documentation would be nice. The Hover thing is already there for some fields,
just need to add more, and complete the documentation.

4) Yep thought of it before never got around to it, from the code:
//**********************************************************************************
//**********************************************************************************
// PDF Files with Images
//
// Images in PDF file could be extracted with pdfimage (Standard with Fedora Core 4 xpdf package)
// and then use GOCR to OCR the images.
//
//**********************************************************************************
//**********************************************************************************

5) Group created, done, back to the main screen

6) Tried here, and that works, do you have the search within checkbox turned on?


7) Different method, of coding, and its this way because Owl was never
re written since it wat started several years ago by another programmer
I have just maintained/added to it.

8) Well you can configure to use SMTP Mailing method OR Regular php mailling method by setting or NOT the
"Use SMTP Mailing Method" checkbox in the Site Features section.

9) Yes I know, i've looked at smarty as well.

10) Yes


Hey, its open source after all if you feel you want to contribute some features go for it we won't stop you,
and it could make Owl even better.

Regards,
B0zz

Another note:

In Owl you show the maximum size owl accepts and PHP accepts.
it's better to do this:

$upload_size = max(
owl,
ini_get('post_max_size'),
ini_get('upload_max_filesize'),
ini_get('memory_limit')
);

And just show the maximum size you can upload ;-).

Grtz,
Steven

Thanks,

B0zz

Sorry, that should be min of course.

Hello there.

I've tried owl some time before, but never got around to using it because one feature that it doesn't have but has been mentioned here, is OCR to make scanned PDFs searchable.

The trouble is most of my documents are PDFs that I scan from documents I have around the house (phone bills, electricity bills, etc) and it would be really helpful if I could just send the PDFs into Owl and just search for an arbitrary word inside of it (for example, "March" to search for bills from that month) and have them appear on the search results.

Is there any way of hacking owl so that tesseract can be used in this way?

Or even any separate free application that can make PDFs searchable before importing them into owl?

Thanks and great job!

Hi,

Tesserac has been added to the Commercial version, and will be available to the Open source community in 12 Months from now.

B0zz

Owl DEV Team wrote:
Hi,

Tesserac has been added to the Commercial version, and will be available to the Open source community in 12 Months from now.

B0zz

Of course I understand and agree that any new feature must be made available for paying customers first. No problem there.

But, for my needs at home, it doesn't make sense for me to spend money on a commercial version.

So, I'll be waiting patiently for that feature on the opensource version in 12 months.

Thanks a lot for your prompt feedback.

Cheers!