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Frequently Asked Questions

Is Lino an accounting software?

Accounting is just one functionality covered by Lino. And actually it isn’t even yet in production anywhere. We are testing it. People usually prefer to use some “established” software for their accounting.

What’s the main function of Lino?

It’s a framework to write applications. Comparable to SAP. Or imagine a very generic ERP software. Here are some functions that are currently being used on Lino production sites:

  • Office functionality (contact management, group calendar, notes, tasks, …)

  • Recording contracts and agreements and print them out

  • Record and maintain customized data about people and business partners

  • Generate pdf or odt documents based on database content.

  • Upload files and manage them

As an application developer, why should I invest time to learn yet another framework?

Because our team is so hygge. Because Lino is so great. With Lino you understand what your users want you to do. With Lino you can concentrate on doing what your users want. With Lino you become a magician.

Why can’t we use plain Django do develop our application?

Nobody uses plain Django. Django application developers always use Django together with their “portfolio” of “add-ons”. For example Jinja, South, bootstrap, jQuery, ExtJS, Memcached … There are many add-ons to Django, and Lino is just one of them.

Django is not designed to provide out-of-the-box solutions. Developing a Django application means that you are going to either write a set of html templates and css files from scratch, or copy and paste them from some other project.

Lino applications are much more out-of-the-box. For example you don’t need to write a single html template and you don’t need to design your URLs because we’ve done this work for you. Of course you are less flexible. Letting others do some work always means that you trust them to make certain decisions.

Read more in Lino and Django

Can I use Lino together with my existing Django add-on?

It depends. Some Django add-ons are directly usable from within a Lino applications, others not. The fact that Lino has its own user management and permissions system makes us enter a new world.

You can use plain Django models that were not written for Lino and add a Lino-style user interface for them to integrate them into a Lino application. You can then gradually convert your Django models to make them more “Lino-like”. You can override Lino’s default URL schema, adding it to an existing Django site.