Hi all,

a possible feature is "order the board". It would be a trivial next step 
on top of CAM: you design your board, you invoke the order action 
(hotkey, menu, cli), select your fab in a dialog box pops up with the 
ordering details, main parameters (e.g. board extents) already filled in, 
maybe even a quotation already queried from the fab. You can change 
parameters as specified by the fab (like silk color, mask color, substrate 
material, etc.) in the same dialog (and maybe get the quotation 
immediately). 

When you are done, you click the order button and the generated files are 
uploaded and the order is placed. Next you need to log in on the fab's web 
page to resolve the payement and you are done.

This all would sit in a new, optional plugin. The dependency would be wget 
(we already have that for fp_wget).

Pros:

- some fields (board dimensions, number of layers, layer thickness, etc.) 
can be filled in by pcb-rnd automatically, by extracting the data from the 
board file - no boring and error prone manual data entering on the 
fab'sweb UI

- you get a very similar pcb-rnd dialog box for different fabs, instead of 
having to learn the different web ui for each fab 

Cons:

- the amount of extra code we would have

- this would work only with a few, cooperating fabs, because the fab 
obviously needs to provide an API 

Question is wheter we want such a featurea, whether our users would use 
it. 

This thread is reserved for discussion, I will shortly post another thread 
with a poll.

Regards,

Igor2