This platform is currently not actively maintained

I would rather say "minimally maintained".
As far as I understood from my contact with the initiators of Erpal Platform they invested a lot of time in the development, but currently they are too busy with other projects to continue a permanent a follow up. In same time there were too few constructive active contribution by the users of this platform to forward the project.

I think it would be a pity if Erpal Platform is given up. Drupal is strongly missing an ERP solution and the Erpal Platform is a great starting point which should not be given up, just for missing manpower. So let's look for a solution with the "Bright Solutions", the company which gave birth to this great tool.

Hey everyone, I want to quickly explain our situation at the moment.

ERPAL Platform is an Open Source Projekt where we were hoping to have close cooperation with the community.
Of course we got some positive feedback. But we also had support questions like „How can I implement my specific UseCase“.
We always tried to answer these questions that came in via email, via issue queue and lots of other communication media. But this was very time consuming.
Sometimes it took us hours to help and solve specific problems. You can interpret this as free support, that is quite helpful for the users. Most of the times we helped we never heard of the person again, which was sad. Not even a simple thank you.

Sometimes people offered us help. So we explained in detail where we see the need of help and how people can participate. Including a community and distributing tasks is very time consuming. Often, after time consuming introduction, we didn’t hear from the person anymore. To us this sometimes felt like wasting time. Only very few (1 or 2) patches were submitted by other people.

Sadly we also often had negative feedback in inappropriately harsh tone, for example „This feature is implemented very bad, it does not work for me at all, you did it wrong“. We took this feedback to our heart and tried to start a discussion. We were always open for suggestions for improvement. We offered complaining people to participate in the development to improve ERPAL. Most of the times after initial negative feedback we didn’t hear from those people about that topic anymore. Often these were features we planned differently than the person tried to use it. So of course it might not work out of the box. But without discussion and without useful feedback we can’t make ERPAL flexible enough to be usable with every use case. So if someone only tells us how bad we have done things we can’t improve that situation.

ERPAL Platform is a huge project. At Bright Solutions we have spent about 3800 hours on this project so far. One should not forget that this costs a lot of money. It is a contribution we love to pay to give something back to the Drupal community. But we can’t give away so many resources for free forever for a project where the feedback and and input from others is somehow lacking.

Recently our order situation is quite high and we are highly involved in customer projects which takes up all of our time. That’s why lately not so much happened around ERPAL Platform. The missing collaboration from the community and the negative feedback also decreased our motivation a bit. We are not able to prioritize the development on ERPAL Platform higher than paying customer projects. When you have high order situation for customer projects and your own project that doesn’t bring in money is prioritized lower, of course you don’t do much in that project. I hope everyone understands that.

Is is sad that we currently don't even find time to add all security updates immediately. But as you have seen we fixed a lot of the last updates. Updating and testing if everything still works after those updates is quite time consuming. So we asked for help with updating and especially testing the updates from the community. Except for ChoY we did’t get too much feedback on that. Thanks again ChoY for your help.

With ERPAL Platform we built a base that we really want to push forward and that we want to improve when we have free resources. Resources can of course be donated or paid by orders. So if someone has a very specific use case he or she needs help with high priority it is possible to buy support from us (or any other Drupal specialist, it is Drupal after all). At the moment we can’t spend much free support and feature development. We are sorry about that but we also need to pay for rent and food etc. We have some projects where people ask us to setup ERPAL for their use case and they pay us to do so. These paid projects have very specific settings, so nothing can be contributed back to the community. For example tax rules for specific countries, or customizing order and invoice pdfs. These customers are very happy with the functionality of ERPAL and if they need something additional they implement it themselves or pay for development. But too often other people seem to expect all-time free support, especially in the issue queues, but we can't provide that at the moment.

We really want to help everybody who has a problem, but you have to accept that we can’t do that. Especially with very custom requests. In future we will at max try to give more directions on how to solve support requests and fix bugs if we find some time, but we will not spend much time on doing it ourselves. The current feature set is enough to serve as a good basis to build business software. New features are currently not planned, but you can always create contrib modules for that. We hope you understand this. If someone wants to participate more or is willing to help supporting this project please contact us so we can discuss further steps.

So yes, currently we can only maintain it minimally and I will set this on the frontpage.

Hi Yuri,
before I used ERPAL platform, I had as well a own solution built around crm_core (with no link to the commerce module). I wasn't very happy with, for it was too much "home made", but it worked. The Erpal platform came up and worked even better. I didn't had the installation problems as you had, but very quickly I saw the limits of ERPAL platform just as you: the dependency on ERPAL modules, some bugs (I ignored in the hope for upcoming patches), and still the biggest disadvantage of ERPAL Platform impossibility to import data via CSV or other media.

I tried then you as you, to build a kind of own ERPAL on an own Drupal standard installation + some standard modules, exacty for the same reasons you are naming. But I gave it up, (after les then a week) because I had to assume, the ERPAL platform could do it better. Therefore I would be more than curious to see how you resolved it?

What I could imagine as best practice for this great Platform is to make the for ERPAL platform less dependent on the good will of the developing company behind, and to replace all ERPAL own builds in the distribution with standard modules, until the whole distribution will be nothing than a bundle of Drupal modules, easily to rebuild, as whole or partly on a standard installation.

I think for the company who supports the whole ERPAL platform development this doesn't have to change their business model offering professional solutions to clients. The just can continue this business as usual, but the can in same time count on bigger community to develop the different sub modules to run the platform.

So thanks in advance yuri for your hints how you build your own "ERPAL"
and thanks in advance about bechthold's comment on my proposal to "democratize" more the ERPAL modules with standard modules.

Interesting read. Thanks bechtold, ChoY, and Yuri for sharing your stories and for your contributions :)

how the erpal invoice generate invoice pdf

invoice dos not support chines language how i can fix it ?