I tried out the online version, and, after adding a ton of products, decided it would be better for me to use the self-hosted version. I got it up and running, and everything seems to be working just fine, for the most part.
Firstly, a minor nitpick. The Ubuntu/Apache guide only mentions having to install the gd, curl, and mcrypt extensions to php5. They might want to add in that (at least in php7), composer will throw off errors if you don’t also add dom, zip, mbstring, and xml.
Anyway, everything’s up and running, and I exported the JSON file from the online version, which seems to contain everything I need. However, when I go to import into the self-hosted install, nothing gets updated. I checked my permissions, all the right directories are apache-writeable, mySQL has the permissions set appropriately, etc. but none of the items are being added. Write permissions are there, because manually added items persist across service restarts, reboots, etc. I turned on query logging and tried again, and it looks like it’s only passing a bunch of SELECT statements to the SQL server and that’s it. I fully admit I’m a complete neophyte with database issues, but doesn’t SELECT just locate items and not actually update/change/add them?
Granted, by this time I could have manually re-added everything, but I’d like to figure this out for future reference, at least.
My second question has to do with the invoice templates. It seems most of them are optimized for A4 sizes. When I change to US Letter, the formatting gets messed up. Essentially, any flourishes like boxes, background shading, etc. don’t take the changed page width into account, while the text seems to change just fine. This results in blank spaces where there previously weren’t any, and text running outside the box.
Is there any plan to make the templates more dynamic with regard to page size, or at least create templates on a per-size basis rather than designing for A4 only?