Stuart Jarvis A troll's eye view

Well, we’re still in sunny Essen at the excellent LinuxHotel as part of the WebWorld Sprint.

WebWorld continues...

More on the websites

Today we have been looking at content management systems to see if one can fit our needs for kde.org. As part of this I have played with Joomla for the first time (having used only WordPress and Drupal before) which takes a little bit of getting used to.

It is also quite scary, going through the kde.org pages to see which ones are out of date or at least not as good as they could be. Hopefully if a CMS works out for us it will be easier for more KDE contributors to go right in and update pages as needed (no knowledge of SVN/Git or PHP needed, just basic HTML and an account on identity.kde.org).

WordPress plugin for identi.ca?

On another webby note, my plugin for syndicating my posts to identi.ca seemed to have stopped working (it was “Network Publisher”, I’ve just switched back to “Identica Tools”, which may or may not work for this post). Does anyone have a recommendation for a plugin that syndicates WordPress blog posts to Identi.ca?

Food

Eugene has once again come up trumps with the food. He should start a KDE catering team…

KDE Time

Apart from the WebWorld tasks, I’ve also been able to spend a bit more time on KDE tasks, including being a bit more active on KDE.News than I have been recently.

Energy

It’s hard to put into words what it is like to be at a KDE sprint, if you have never been. The best way to sum it up is “energy”. Many of us were working until around 11pm last night and ready to go again at 9am this morning. There are few things better than working with fellow KDE enthusiasts on doing awesome and getting away from the distractions of “real life” boosts KDE productivity immensely.

Ok, we seem to have reached some consensus – today (Thursday) is day one. And what a day…

Userbase

Part of the team has been working hard on Userbase, fixing issues, changing editing guidance, exploring anonymous editing, improving translation tools and tweaking the look and feel.

The Main KDE Website

The rest of us worked on the kde.org website, considering how the ideal layout should look, what links are really necessary and how they should best be arranged. We also considered the best backend means for supporting the website and making it easier for contributors to keep pages relevant to their areas up to date, while also not wasting time re-inventing the wheel for each of our websites.

We also spent an enjoyable 30 minutes or so critiquing the websites of other free and proprietary software organisations.

Other Websites

KDE has an obscene number of *.kde.org subdomains, many of which contain outdated content or content that is duplicated – or easier found – elsewhere. We worked on criteria for when subdomains should be granted and started collecting more statistics to see how people are using our websites.

A snazzy logo

After much harassment, Eugene has proved once again that he is not only an excellent at organising a barbecue, but also a talented artist. Unveil… drumroll.. the WebWorld Sprint Logo:

KDE WebWorld Logo

Sunshine

And it’s still sunny and warm here in Essen. In contrast to Randa where it all seems to have gone a bit quiet. Has the weather in Randa left our intrepid KDE contributors cold and sluggish?

Or was it ‘Day One’? I can never quite decide… Either way, it was Wednesday, though after spending Tuesday night awake in the airport I was a little disoriented.

The WebWorld Sprint has begun at the Linux Hotel near Essen in Germany. All the attendees arrived throughout Wednesday and – in contrast to conditions in Randa the sun has been shining on us. Yesterday evening we had a barbecue in the hotel garden, enjoyed some evening sun and then got to the first of the meetings about the extravagant number of KDE subdomains and our plans for the sprint.

The real work starts today, but already we have got everyone together, everyone has learnt a lot of new faces and we have had some general discussion about the challenges facing KDE’s assets on the web and how we can overcome them. With 3-4 days of the sprint remaining – depending on individual leaving times, we expect to get a lot done.

In the meantime, we just wait for resident artist to sort us out with a snazzy sprint logo to illustrate our blog posts…

Next week, I’ll be heading off to the KDE Web World Sprint to represent the KDE Promotion Team.

Web, by Curt Smith

We had a combined sprint back in 2009 when the current version of the main KDE website was designed in consultation between the two teams and KDE’s artists. The result was a site that much improved on what we had before, but there is still more to be done.

The last few years have also seen the growth and improvement of KDE’s wikis, from the phenonmenal UserBase that should be the first stop for any user of KDE software experiencing difficulties to TechBase and our Community Wiki. However, these could integrate better with one another and with the main website and – importantly – all look like they belong together.

The Web Team comprises many of KDE’s unsung heroes, so in addition to building links between them and the Promotion Team, I’ll also take the opportunity to blog about the cool things they are working on and get some interviews done to raise the profile of their work a bit. Like many (all?) teams in KDE, they need more help to progress at an even faster pace and to help us all get the most out of *.kde.org. So if you’re interested, keep an eye on the Planet and the Dot for more information

Over at the Blue Mint, KDE contributor James Cain is asking for help in collating information on enterprises (including non-profits) using KDE software. He aims to gather material to relaunch our outdated enterprise site with current information showing how KDE software can help businesses and other organisations give their staff better software, save money and take control of their IT infrastructure.

So please, head over to the Blue Mint and help if you can.