Fidus Writer 3.7 is quite stable and also quite feature complete. The release cycle may soon switch to one annual release, but we are not quite there yet.
Any ideas on what should be prioritized for version 3.8?
3.8 development - priorities?
I agree that Fiduswriter has become stable and rather feature-complete. So keep up the good work! After using the editor quite intensely over the last few months, I see the following points that one could work on:
- One more paragraph type: code blocks
- Word counter: also show counts for currently highlighted part of the document
And: a lot more documentation is necessary. For example, competently using the bibliography feature or the templates feature is not self-explanatory and not well-documented. Also, rather than spreading such information out in FAQ, Forum and Blog, it should go into a dedicated, systematic documentation.
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Quite independently of the tool itself, the “payment” page of Fiduswriter lacks some key information: payment options (currently Credit Card only?), the renewal mechanism (automatic?), the minimum subscription duration (1 month or more?), the cancellation policy (anytime?). Providing this upfront will build trust and help boost subscription numbers, I am sure.
Hey @c.schoech,
thanks for your comments. Let me try to answer them below.
Documentation - Point taken. The main excuse for the current situation is that both Fidus Writer, the languages used, Python and JavaScript, and the packaging systems were changing rapidly and so any documentation would have been entirely outdated by the release of the next version.
This situation has changed now and it will probably be a good idea to write a dedicated manual that can be downloaded as a PDF, maybe after the release of the next version around Spring 2020.
Code blocks - we did have those at one time. The main issue with them was that they caused problems when users didn’t put in line breaks in very long lines. We can probably put them back but have automatic line breaking in those cases that a line is exceptionally long.
Word counter - good idea!
Payment - the main issue is currently that the payment gateway Stripe that we are using (the most common payment system for independent software-as-a-service offerings) is strangely incomplete/buggy. Missing features are things like handling of European VAT and handling users changing their payment information. I have seen others have kind of gotten this to work by hacking it on their side, but they still have issues like the first invoice not including VAT. The fact that Germans – one of the larger communities of Fidus Writer users – don’t tend to use credit cards much is not helping either. I’m currently looking at other alternatives. Preferably something where everything is integrated so that users can choose from more payment options, it takes care of either handling VAT directly or of calculating the correct VAT rate in all of the EU, and users can update their payment details directly. Once something like that is in place, it would make sense to update the page with better information as well.
If anyone has suggestions for payment solutions to review that fulfill some of the above requirements, I’d be interested.
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An update on payment: This is now handled by Paddle.com. They are basically reselling the service, so they are somewhat more costly, but can offer local currencies and they take care of charging and paying taxes within the EU, which makes it worth it in our case.
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An update on word counter for selection and Code blocks: The word counter has been added in version 3.7.20. The code blocks have also been reenabled.
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