The Substantially Similar Weblog

I have lots of photos of social justice events (Protests, Rallies, etc.) My personal photos have moved. If you know my mother’s maiden name, you can enter that as the username and password (all lower case) by clicking here; otherwise please e-mail me for access to these photos. I figure this way you’ll either be a friend of the family, or my credit card company. These photos are displayed using salonify, a free software program I’m working on.

CoopOrder is a free software web-based buying club cooperative ordering system written by Adam Kessel in perl 5.8. It is intended to work with United Northeast’s system (formerly Northeast Cooperatives), which is a bulk whole foods supplier, part of United Natural Foods, Inc., but could conceivably be adapted to other systems as well.

Why don’t you try it and see what you think? I always need comments and bug reports. You should log on as ‘guest’. You have free reign of the system as guest—try everything out, it won’t do any harm at all. You can even submit your order (it won’t really go in).

See the changelog for the latest updates.

There is also a low volume email list to which you can subscribe to talk about CoopOrder or other wholesale food buying club issues.

Here’s a list of some of the more recent features; in the near future I’ll organize this and present it more systematically:

• Multiple Buying Clubs. CoopOrder can now support many buying clubs, each with their own delivery schedule, pricelist, contact information, message board, splits, etc.. Each club can has a coordinator who can clear, lock, submit, or archive the order. The coordinator can also add new members to the buying club, and deputize them as coordinators as well. A buying club coordinator can only effect her own buying club—she can’t interfere with anything with any other buying club. Note that both the New Oxford and Brattleboro pricelists are available.
• Password protection. Although every member by default has no password, you can click ‘password and settings’ and set a password for yourself (except the guest user, who always has no password). If you forget your password, the buying club coordinator can reset it for you.
• Export to FoodLink Format. I need someone to try this out and see if it actually will import into FoodLink! “Import From FoodLink” is coming soon as well.
• Better (I hope) user interface all around. Clearer menus. More logical groupings of buttons. And a spiffy logo.
• Better handling on invoices. This will need some testing, but I believe the program is smarter now about handling out of stock, ordered but not on invoice, price change, random weight, etc..
• More stable/robust design. This is mostly internal but it should make it easier to maintain and improve CoopOrder.
• You can now search for things in plural or singular. E.g., “apples” will return thing with “apple” or “apples” in it.
• Categories are now searchable as a pull down list, so you don’t need to know the name of the category you wish to search in.
• “Incomplete Splits Only”. If you check this box, you will see splits that still need to be completed within your buying club. It will tell you how much you need to order in order to complete the split and give you the option of doing it right there. Note that splits are done as fractions in CoopOrder: 0.5 = half a case, 0.25 = one quarter, etc..
• You can do “google” like searches on description. For example, “apples -juice -pie” gives you everything with apple or apples but not juice and not pie.