Dear Community,

I am very sad to announce that I am looking for a new maintainer for InvoicePlane.

Since launching the app back in 2014, saving Fusioninvoice 1.3 from oblivion, I have worked for like thousands of hours on it and built a large infrastructure including the website and so on. I have learned a lot about development, management and community building - many times by doing mistakes. That’s not really negative because learning from mistakes is still learning. However, some decisions weren’t that good for the project and I really think that InvoicePlane could be way ahead of where it is now.

The main reason for resigning as the maintainer is, that I just can’t keep up with all the work that needs to be done. I am working full time and have some other things to do, so I can barely make a couple of hours free for the project every week.

InvoicePlane is not an application for writing a personal blog or keeping track of your movie collection. It is an app for managing your business with highly legal requirements which are all different in every country. If you are - like me - not familiar with all these laws and have no time to actually learn about them, it’s incredibly hard to build an app like InvoicePlane.

Also, it feels like it’s time to move on and work on other projects.

The next steps

First of all, I will try to finish at least version 1.5.10 which includes a lot of fixes that are really important. After that I will just keep all websites and tools running. In the meantime I am open for applications from interested people for being maintainer.

I will try to keep everything up and running, at least until 2019-05-21 which is the date the invoiceplane.com domain expires.

Information for people interested in maintaining the project

I will not accept any applications from people who are new to InvoicePlane. A new maintainer should be familiar with at least one of the versions (InvoicePlane 1 or version 2 which is based on FusionInvoice).

Also, I would like to see the project being taken over by multiple people, or even better, a company. At least two people should work on the project, maybe one community manager and one main developer. Trust me, it’s too much for a single person.

Maintainer Tasks (Update)

The following tasks need to be done by the people who would like to keep the project running:

- Most important: Project Leader

The most important role is the person that acts like a chairman to the project. He/she takes care that all tasks are assigned, the community is growing and, most important, having a clear vision of the future of the project. This is a task for someone that is highly interested in keeping the project alive and growing the userbase.

Also, this person is highly likable to manage sensitive accounts like PayPal.

Comparable position: CEO, CFO

- Application Development

Development of the application(s) itself, including possible hotfixes and improvements for InvoicePlane 1 and the main development on InvoicePlane 2. Good knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS and JS is required. Frameworks used: Codeigniter (IP1), Laravel (IP2), Bootstrap 3/4.

This also involves the review and management of contributed code via Github. Good knowledge of Git and Github are beneficial.

The position of a lead developer is comparable with the position of a CTO: only little programming, making sure that development runs straight, do major code reviews, take care of vulnerability reports, make sure that all other developers know what’s to do.

- Infrastructure Development and Maintenance

Quite heavy tasks because all websites and tools built and used by the project need to be maintained. Including the development and maintenance of the websites (all built with Laravel), the demo, community forums (Discourse), some smaller tools like Yourls for link shortening, the issue tracker (Atlassian Jira) and Gitlab.

This task must be taken by someone that is familiar with Unix server management and has already worked with the said tools.

Comparable position: CIO

- Community Support and Building

Be there for the community, help wherever you can and take care of any questions that may arise, including partnerships, support requests, feature requests and so on.

Also, take the initiative and talk to people about partnerships and so on. Write articles about InvoicePlane and make sure that releases are communicated properly.

This also involves the management of all social media accounts and the newsletter.

Comparable position: COO

- Testing and Documentation

Quite hard job for me because it takes a lot of time. Testing is beneficial for making sure that a new release leaves the house clean. Also, document all changes in the changelog and keep the wiki updated.

Expected Workload

This highly depends on how many people would like to maintain the project and how tasks are split up. At the moment I spend about 30 min per day for community support, emails and so on. About 10 to 60 min per week are used to maintain the infrastructure (running updates, pushing fixes, correcting typp,…). The rest is completely free

If you are interested, please contact me directly via PM here or via Slack. We will then talk about everything.

New Maintainers and Contributors

The following users are willing to continue the project. Mind joining them?

Name Specialization / Interest Keith @clockwiseq Hosting, general management Daniel @Severenth General management Rabih @snake_eyes Server / domain maintenance Jan @Teunis Domain / website maintenance Miquel @miquel_cabanas Development, community support Jan @749 Development Pradesh @crafter Development

At this point I want to thank all users of InvoicePlane for their support. It was an awesome experience to build InvoicePlane with you.

If you have any questions regarding the project and it’s future, feel free to leave a comment.

Please spread the word so we may find a new team fast.

Best regards,

Kevin