It’s not funny to read the blog post about the development of a new LibreOffice extensions and templates page. The post lacks of the whole picture about the development and history of the current LibreOffice extensions and templates site. It seemed as if there were no development over the years since the start of the site. But that’s not the case.
The site was first launched in summer 2011 during the first LibreOffice conference in Paris. This site (correctly two sites) was running on Plone 4 using the Plone add-on ‘Plone Software Center’ with the blobstorage addition. This site runs for some years up to the end of 2016.
In the meantime I worked on two new Plone add-ons for an update of the site. I adapted the structure of the new add-ons to the needs of the extension and template submitter from the few feedback I got over the years. I gave presentations about my work on LibreOffice conferences, but without attendance of The Document Foundation (TDF) core members (e.g. board, employees, staff). There were no real vested interest in this area of the project.
I finished my work on a first stable version of the new add-ons in 2016 and I could launch the new (renovated) LibreOffice extensions and templates with the support of a Plone service provider at the end of December 2016. The service provider created a highly scalable productive environment for the new site and migrated the content from the old site into the structure of the new one.
I worked further on the Plone add-ons for the extensions and templates site since then and made some further improvements following the few feedback I got from contributors to the site. I worked in parallel as admin of the site and content reviewer for new extensions and templates. This took a lot of my spare time.
I dropped this admin and review work in autumn 2018 because a member of TDF board criticized my work on the site in public without any preceding talk to me. This was a contempt of my volunteer work on the site and the endless spare time which I spent contributing to LibreOffice and The Document Foundation. In addition other board members didn’t support me and criticized the behavior of the board member in public. This showed me that TDF is not really connected to its Code of Conduct (https://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/code-of-conduct/). It’s more of a nice to have (written text) but not part of the TDF DNA. The project has no real supportive sustainable culture in communication style and behavior.
Although I dropped my admin and reviewer role on the LibreOffice extensions and templates site I worked on the code of the site further. I made some additions to the structure of the Plone add-ons following the feedback I got from contributors and updated the site’s buildout to Plone 5.1.
Because Python 2 got at the end of its live I worked in parallel on a migration of the Plone add-ons for the LibreOffice extensions and templates site to Python version 3. I finished this work some weeks ago and made Python 3 compatible releases of the add-ons. They were published on the Cheeseshop (https://pypi.org). Each add-on got also it’s own user documentation which I wrote during the development process.
I did also some work for Python 3 compatibility on the LibreOffice extensions and templates site buildout in a seperate branch. This work is making good progress and should be finished during the next weeks (depends on my available spare time). The site could run on Python 3 and Plone 5.2 then.
My current work is already publicly available on Github. I published it under the General Public License v. 2 (GPL-2).
The new post on TDF blog paints a different picture, as if the site and its code hasn’t changed and developed over the years. From my point of view this is a new threat on me and my countless volunteer work on LibreOffice and for TDF. I could not take the words of thank in the TDF blog post seriously. Seemed to be (necessary) flowers of speech.