Thanks to a big contribution from the Millennium Villages Project and Andreas Kollegger, we now have a richer way of representing concept names. You can read more about this here.
So with that big change, we’re drawing a line in the sand and releasing OpenMRS 1.4 beta. You can find that on the pre-releases page.
This is Beta, so expect bugs. I’d love it if people install this, try it out, and let me know about any issues that come up. Just create a trac ticket, and cc it to djazayeri. I will be your friendly neighborhood Release Manager for 1.4.
So how long until this is ready for production use? Good question. A few releases down the road, we intend to have a more structured QA strategy. But for the moment, testing is going to be ad-hoc. The PIH sites in Rwanda, Malawi, and Lesotho are running this in production now, perhaps unwisely, so we’ll be finding some of the bugs. (In fact we’ve already found and fixed many.) Other testers will find more. Over the next month, as we fix those bugs, we’ll progress to releasing this as a Release Candidate. I’d hope this happens by mid-January, but that’s a wild guess. It could be faster, it could be slower.
Andreas is the technical contact, but if people have questions about what are concept names, what flags mean, or what are reference maps, please direct those to me via the dev or implementers listserve.
-Andy
Note that this beta version has one known issue: The first time you load it, you need to run “Update Concept Words” (link to from the Admin screen) in order to be able to search concepts.
We are working on a fix for this so that it is not necessary in the final release.