I am contemplating a significant change in this product's direction, and would like your help in ascertaining what the future of Forena should be. Some points to note:

  • Forena has largely developed based on my own volunteer efforts. Much of the product has been build after my normal 8 hour day job.
  • Originally I thought of Forena as a report writing tool that would be used by site builders, but lately it has become evident it has been far more effective as a rapid application development tool, and that most people write reports and data sources in code (frx and sql files)
  • Forena is generally more popular outside the United States than inside. This has made recruiting maintainers challenging.
  • The forena product is used heavily as a development and report writing tool at my place of business and will be for the foreseeable future. So it willl continue to exist in some form.

So the big question remains. Where does Forena go from here? The basic questions are:

  • Would we rather see Forena as a standalone PHP/Symfony library that could integrate with drupal?
  • Are the SQL editing tools and the wysiwyg editors still useful in forena? That is are the worth the development effort required to maintain them?
  • Is Forena primarily useful as a tool to embed external data in Drupal 8 or is it used to report on nodes contained in drupal?
  • How important is PDF generation to forena?
  • How do we get more people involved in maintaining Forena?

Your opinions are very welcome. Please leave them by commenting on this issue or my YouTube channel.

Also please visit http://forena.org and fill out the poll questions and or surveys you find on that page.

Comments

metzlerd created an issue. See original summary.

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metzlerd commented
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metzlerd commented
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XII_IKE’s picture

XII_IKE commented

I have been using Forena for a couple years now. Initially it was supposed to be a temporary measure while we looked for other reports engines. But as time went on I did not find something that suited us better. Drupal was never something that we needed or used without the Forena component. Over the years our organization has grown and we just completed a major migration which was going to require us rebuild almost all of our reports.

We decided that it was time to build our own reports engine on Symphony and in the meantime launch a temporary Forena site. Imagine my surprise that when I went to read the latest notes that you were considering the same move. I think for our use case we would love to see a standalone Forena.

In short I am willing to contribute to this project. My primary use case is queries against SQL Server and MySQL. One of the major things we were looking to add here was a data warehousing element to consolidate feeds from different API's and engines. Also to create email alerts based on query results. Thank you for all the work you have put into this and I wish Forena the best of luck in the future.

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XII_IKE commented
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metzlerd commented

That is particularly good to know. I have started work at the following repository: http://gitlab.com/forena.

lolcode’s picture

lolcode commented

We use Forena in a few projects as method of embedding external data into Drupal - so far that's been CiviCRM data from a separate database.

The Symfony library approach would be welcomed since that would offer the option of embedding the reports directly into CiviCRM.

PDF generation is important simply because it is a very popular option for reporting system.

We have not used the SQL editing tools or the wysiwyg editors but they are really nice to have as an option to provide to more advanced site builders.

jpfrancesconi’s picture

jpfrancesconi
Juampi
Primary language Spanish
Location Paraná, Entre Ríos.
commented

Metz, is the xls or doc download link available on Drupal 8? Because i tried but don't appear anything. Thank you a lot !

srq_civicrm’s picture

srq_civicrm commented

Assuming Symfony preserves Drupal's permissions/access controls, it sounds like the right direction. My use case is also CiviCRM.

qjensen’s picture

qjensen commented

I'm using Forena for the first time right now and I may be using it with CiviCRM in the near future. I think the idea of making a Symfony module is excellent. It will still be useful in Drupal and it will be a much needed standard reporting tool for PHP developers.