Friday 29 July 2016

A call for developers, translators, documenters and medical professionals

Care2x (http://www.care2x.org) is a fully featured open source hospital information system (HIS). It is used in many hospitals all around the world. However in recent years for various reasons activity on the project has slowed and has practically come to a standstill. Another problem is that there are a number of different versions of Care2x around.

However the code did not run at all on PHP 7.0 and as more and more server operating systems are distributed with PHP 7.0 the project was in danger of dying. This would have been a major shame as it is a great application, and the developers have done amazing job in the past.

A few of us decided we didn't want this to happen so have been working on bringing the code base up to date. Our work so far can be seen here (https://care2x.kwamoja.org/) The user name/password is admin/kwamoja. This server is running PHP 7.0 and the code should now work on both PHP 5.x and 7.x versions. The very latest code can be downloaded from here (https://github.com/care2x/care2x/archive/master.zip). Please note this is still being updated very regularly and is for testing purposes.

I have been working on integrating this code with the medical branch of the KwaMoja open source ERP (https://medical.kwamoja.org). If this integration is not required then both will run fine as standalone applications.

We have now reached the point where we need help. In no particular order we need:

1. Developers: Care2x is written using PHP/MySQL/Javascript. If you know any of these, or just want to learn, then go to github, clone the repository and get coding. There is a mailing list for developers that you can subscribe to here (https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/care2002-developers) where you can ask questions and get any advice you need to get going.

2. Translators: Translation files are stored under the language/ subdirectory. Each language is then stored under a two letter sub-directory denoting the language. So language/en for English, language/de for German etc. Each of these files contains variable assignments such as this from language/en/lang_en_departments.php:
 $LDHeadlines='Headlines'; 
Then there should be a corresponding entry
$LDHeadlines='Nachrichten';    
in language/de/lang_de_departments.php and in each of the other translations. What is required is that people check that the files contain the same variables (at the moment they don't) for each translation, and where they don't new variables with appropriate translations are done. If somebody wishes to create a new language translation they just need to create a new subdirectory under the language and get translating.

3.Documenters: Like most open source projects Care2x could always do with improved documentation. There is an old wiki here (http://wiki.care2x.org/index.php?title=Main_Page). We need people to read this documentation, update with regard to the new code, and add new documentation.

4. Medical Professionals: Care2x is intended to be used by medical professionals. It would be great if such people can use care2x, especially with regard to the work flow, and make any suggestions (though we don't make any promises on implementation!). Any suggestions can be logged on github here (https://github.com/care2x/care2x/issues). This includes any bugs that are found. As said previously this code is still being developed so will contain bugs. Please try to put an appropriate label to each issue to help us resolve them.

6 comments:

  1. I can work in PHP/MySQL as well in translations to Spanish.... alvaro@pango.co.ke

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    1. Call me in Skype as hk3jhr...

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    2. Hi, I don't use Skype any more but you can contact me on tim@weberpafrica.com and we can discuss further

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  2. I'm English to Hausa translator

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    1. Great, any help you need be sure to let me know.

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  3. Well, most non-binary files in my downloaded master.zip have this LF - CR problem. I had to run dos2unix recursively on the entire directory. But now, when I open firefox and navigate to localhost, I get this 5 sec warning about missing installation files and URL changes to http://localhost/installer/install.php?restart_installer=true That's all i'm seeing at this point. Apache (2) error.log is empty. Do I have to integrate the DB (MySQL) beforehand or can I configure it online like in KwaMoja? Probably there is my mistake. On the other hand, my ubuntu and PHP version might be too new (Ubuntu 17.10 and PHP 7.1)?

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