KNomos
I have just installed the latest version of Knomos and want to share a
few preliminary comments from an Australian perspective. At this
stage I have done little more than install the package, and this
should be borne in mind. I would like to thank the developers for
making such a comprehensive package available.
Firstly, the program was I understand developed originally for Italy.
Although it does support English such support is not yet complete.
For example, I could not find any English Installation instructions
and had to resort to machine translation of the install document that
accompanies the package. This did cause some difficulties but
eventually I did end up with a working installation. The next problem
was that the menus were unusable. Some searching revealed that the
problem was the package was unable to find the relevant style sheet,
which it was expecting to find in /var/www/ rather than
/var/www/Knomos. This was overcome by placing appropriate symlinks in
/var/www. The language of the admin user defaults to Italian and I
changed this directly in the mysql database, which seemed to work.
I then created a normal user. A brief tour of the interface reveals a
wealth of options. However, the design is of course tailored to
Italy. Some pages of the interface are not completely translated to
English. There is a list of items for costing purposes which is only
in Italian and apparently relates to some sort of Italian costing
tariff. The items may well be easily translated, but I'm not yet sure
how useful this will be in Australia. Likewise, the fields in the
database also seem to be at least partially tailored to the Italian
Law and Courts.
I intend to have a closer look at the package but my initial reaction
is that it will need some customisation to realise its potential in
Australia. This is not to say that it will not be useful at all
without. For example, I am looking forward to testing the document
generation features, which may present some alternative to the
expensive proprietary packages currently available.
I'd be interested in any thoughts others may have on this package,
particularly on using it in an English language environment and in
Australia or other common law jurisdictions..
regards,
Darryl Barlow
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