About PyCharm Odoo's future

[Trịnh Anh Ngọc]

Hi everyone, I am the author of the PyCharm Odoo plugin. Today I want to share some thoughts about the plugin and its future.

Back to the end of 2018 when I started my current job as an Odoo developer. At that time, I was the only developer who uses PyCharm in my company, other developers including my boss use Eclipse + PyDev instead. One day my boss called me and he asked:

Eclipse shows red underlines at some Odoo imports (e.g. from odoo.addons.portal.controllers.portal import CustomerPortal). It is valid imports but Eclipse doesn't seem to be able to understand it. What about your PyCharm?

I said that my PyCharm was not also able to understand those imports. At that time, every IDE/Text Editor could not understand Odoo framework. After that day, I often thought how to make my PyCharm able to understand these Odoo stuff. After a lot of research, I could make my PyCharm resolve these imports, and it led to the first commit 31b7b14.

About two years have passed and today, the PyCharm Odoo plugin is not only understand Odoo imports, it also understands how Odoo model inheritance works, where is an XML ID defined, and many other things in Odoo source code. I can proudly say that the PyCharm Odoo plugin is only the plugin that truly understands Odoo framework. PyCharm with this plugin is the most powerful IDE for all Odoo developers. I also very happy because the plugin has been trusted by many Odoo developers around the world. Many people in them contacted me to say thanks for the plugin, and that makes me believe the value of the plugin also my work on it.

As you all know, both PyCharm and Odoo have a very active development. A new PyCharm version is released every 4 months while a new Odoo version is released every year. Every new version comes with a lot of changes. So it takes a lot of time and effort to support not only many PyCharm versions, but also many Odoo versions. And I have decided to make the PyCharm Odoo is a paid plugin from now on. This repository will be archived, and a new repository will be created for issues and feature requests. The price will be affordable for every professional developers compared to its value. I hope you all understand this decision and continue to support me and the PyCharm Odoo plugin development. Thanks!