LibreOffice Extensions- and Templates-Site – Fixed an Issue

Publiziert am 12. März 2013 von andreasma

Today I came across an issue with adding downloadable files that occur with the migrated site. I had to investigate the traceback that I get and remembered that there was a similar error message long time ago. I looked into my email archive and found the thread about this issue with Caolan. I run the instance of the Plone site in foreground mode (fg) and saw that the site used the wrong package without our patch. I changed this and the site works with the patched add-on. The issue with adding a downloadable file to a release is gone now.

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LOPDFConverter – LibreOffice PDF Converter – New Version

Publiziert am 10. März 2013 von andreasma

I worked on the LibreOffice PDF Converter project (a command line tool to convert office documents to PDF using LibreOffice in headless mode) a bit more. First I had to reconstruct my build environment with Netbeans 6.8 and Java 1.6.x and the OOoAPIPlugin. But that doesn’t work out of the box with LibreOffice, because Netbeans and the plugin didn’t know anything about LibreOffice. It was easy to fix the missing link to the JDK and the I could also inform the plugin about the link to LibreOffice and the SDK, but there were some build dependency missing. I search about the topic of LibreOffice and Netbeans and stumbled across a very helpful blog entry: http://othmanelmoulatblog.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/the-move-from-openoffice-to-libreoffice/

I had to add the following jars:
juh.jar,
jurt.jar,
ridl.jar and
unoloader.jar th
from my <LibreOffice_Home>/ure/share/java) manually to the classpath of my project.

Once I did this all the dependy were fulfilled and the LOPDFConverter.jar was created. I uploaded a new version of this java program to the project site on SourceForge.net:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lopdfconverter/

Direct downloadlink: http://sourceforge.net/projects/lopdfconverter/files/latest/download

I moved the project source from the old svn repository to a new git repository.

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LOPDFConverter – LibreOffice PDF Converter

Publiziert am 9. März 2013 von andreasma

I created the project LOPDFConverter at SourceForge.net some time ago. It’s a jar-file that was started from the command line with “java -jar LOPDFConverter <options> <filename> and uses LibreOffice in the headless mode to convert a file (in a format that could be read by the office suite) into PDF. If you want to know about the available options type “java -jar LOPDFConverter -h” and you will get a long list with short descriptions.

The little Java program LOPDFConverter is written by Andre Schnabel and myself and can use all the options that are available in the pdf export dialog of LibreOffice. LOPDFConverter makes it easy to create pdf files with specific settings without special instructions of the service user about them. E.g. it is posible to create all pdf documents in the format of PDF/A and imbed the used fonts.

The Java program LOPDFConverter uses the power of LibreOffice and its rich set of file import filter. LibreOffice is therefore known as  the swiss knife of the office work.

You can download LOPDFConverter from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lopdfconverter/?source=directory

There will be a new version soon.

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LibreOffice Extensions Site – Form to Request an Account

Publiziert am 4. März 2013 von andreasma

The admin team of the LibreOffice team discovered in the last weeks that there were some issues with not used accounts on the extensions and templates site. The team decided to look over this accounts and delete especially the not activated and change the setting of the site from self creating of an account to asking for an account.

I’ve created a new add-on with a form for this. Everyone who want to publish an extension project on the LibreOffice extensions site could ask very easy for an account with this form. The form could be called from the site action of the LibreOffice extensions Plone site; e.g: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/@@ask-for-an-account

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Moving LibreOffice Plone Sites to a new Server

Publiziert am 26. Februar 2013 von andreasma

The Document Foundation rent for the LibreOffice project a new more powerful server for the website services. This meant that the LibreOffice extensions- and templates site and the conference site had also to move from the old hardware to the newer one. Because both sites are already running on Plone 4.2.4 the migration was relative easy. I created a new virtual python environment on the new server first. Then I made for both sites their special policy package. This packages contains all add-on that should be loaded into the sites. Once I had done that I worked on a buildout script respectively two with the data for creating the zeoserver with currently two instances. I placed this buildout scripts into an environment that I bootstraped with a special file that I downloaded from a Plone server. The bootstrap script created the necessary directories.

The last step was the call of the buildout process via the executable buildout and the switch with -c and the name of the buildout script, e.g. ‘bin/buildout -c zeo.cfg’. This took a bit and everything went well. The new Plone environment was created.

Once this was done I moved the database (Data.fs) and the blobstorage into the var directory of the new instance and fired the zeoserver and the instance up. After some test of the new site Florian switched the URLs extensions.libreoffice.org, templates.libreoffice.org and conference.libreoffice.org to the Plone environments on the new server. The sites are much faster now due to the more powerful hardware.

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My Home-Hackfest: new Development for LibreOffice Templates-Website

Publiziert am 25. November 2012 von andreasma

I created a site for the LibreOffice templates last year. The site uses Plone with an add-on product “Plone Software Center”. This add-on works with the objects “project”, “releases-section”, “release”,  “downloadable file” and “linked file”. This structure is easy to understand for a developer but makes it a bit more difficult for a contributor that would only provide a template for LibreOffice. Thus I decided to rework the template website some time ago, but I had a lack of spare time for the necessary development.

Some month ago I heard and learned a bit about a new content object framework for Plone that should make many development steps a bit easier, the Dexterity content types. I used this new framework to setup the LibreOffice conference website with an add-on for managing the conference program (from Call for Papers to the schedule) (it will need some improvements for the next conference). The conference is over now and I got some space for the development of a new template-site add-on. I just started with a new add-on on the ground of Dexterity. It will provide a multilanguage feature (translatable pages). I started with an overall structure of the new product and developed some Python modules and their views. I read through the slides and content of a training (class) at the Plone conference 2012 and learned another way to create Dexterity  content types. I used this knowledge for the further development of the new template-site add-on. I created a page for a file upload in a different way that makes it easier to create a template for displaying the content (see a first screenshot below). I use currently no special style for the site (page). It’s pure Plone style.

 

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First Steps to my first Diazo-Theme for LibreOffice-Plone-Sites

Publiziert am 19. November 2012 von andreasma

I heard some time ago about a new method to theme Plone sites. It’s the new Diazo-Theming-Engine that is implemented in Plone now.

I started with a try-out of different free Diazo-Themes (see one in the picture below) yesterday and created a new layout product (project) from scratch for this purpose. I worked on this further today and added some more content to this Plone-AddOn. I have uploaded my current work to github.com (https://github.com/andreasma/am.libocontheme).

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ODFAuthors-Site with new Layout Product

Publiziert am 15. November 2012 von andreasma

The Plone site ODFAuthors.org got a security update last week and I noticed that there was an issue with the layout of the site. I investigated and found out that during the run of the buildout script the site got also a new version of the layout product that was customized on the file system. The new version doesn’t contained the customized files and thus I decided to create an own layout product for ODFAuthors on the file system.

Because I could not find a template for this purpose that I could use with paster or templer I used a layout product from another Plone site that I maintain on a resource of The Document Foundation and created a new layout product with a different name out of it. There were some issues with the naming that costs me some evenings of my spare time but in the end I managed it. The new layout product lives is integrated in the Plone-Site ODFAuthors now and everything works as expected. I will make some finetuning of the layout in the next days.

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LibreOffice Conference Registration Form

Publiziert am 22. September 2012 von andreasma

The LibreOffice conference site is running on Plone 4.2.1 and uses an add-on-product, that I created for the conference management. This add-on contains also a form for the registration for the LibreOffice conference in October 2012. I made this form with different fields where the user had to fill in his data. Some of these fields are required, e.g. the first name. Because people sometimes forget to fill in data in the required fields there are some build-in validator. I added two custom ones for the email-address and for the acception of the privacy policy. I hope this helps the users of the form and the organizers of the LibreOffice conference to make the registration process a bit more smooth.

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Registration Form for the LibreOffice Conference

Publiziert am 4. August 2012 von andreasma

The LibreOffice conference will take place in Berlin this Oktober. I’m part of the organizers team and I’m working on a conference organizing tool. We use for the conference website the CMS Plone and I developed an add-on for this CMS from scratch. During the last days I worked on an implementation of a registration form for the conference. I finished my work on a first beta of this form today, once I added successfully a ReCaptcha to the form.

If you want to test the form you can do it on the development site for the conference add-on: http://vm5.documentfoundation.org:9090/conference2. There is an entry “Register for the conference” near the bottom of the site. You can send your feedback to the mailing address on the front page of the development site or write your feedback into the message field at the bottom of the form.

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