Autor: Andreas Mantke

Stopped My Work For LibO DE-Community

I worked with the German speaking community of LibreOffice (and OOo) for more than fifteen years. I stopped this involvement for some reasons some weeks ago. I don’t know, if the reasons for my decision will disappear next time.

I currently continue my work with the LibreOffice extensions and templates website, a volunteer project that I founded in 2011 and whose environment I developed together with a service provider to a new status (2.0). The LibreOffice extensions and templates website uses the Content Management System Plone with additional plug-ins, all developed and published under free software licenses.

First Steps With The LMS Ilias

I researched a bit about Learn Managment Systems (LMS) and came across a system named Ilias. This LMS is used by some institutions, e.g. the Fachhochule für Verwaltung Nordrhein-Westfalen (a university of applied science in North Rhine Westfalia). I currently got an user account at their LMS and could do some work in a user space. The LMS and their instance seemed to have a lot of features. The development of the Ilias LMS seemed to be very active. They publish regularly minor releases.

But I was also curious about the admin site of the Ilias LMS and thus I took the time to install an instance on my notebook. I used the current version 5.3.5 and copied all files to a webcontent directory of the Apache webserver. Once I pointed my browser to that directory I got a webpage with the check of the installation requirements. I installed the missing ones and set the necessary permissions. Then I followed the next steps of the Ilias installation. I got an issue with the database installation, because the setting for ‚max_allowed_packet‘ didn’t suit the needs of Ilias. I fixed that on the command line of  MariaDB. I logged into MariaDB with admin rights and typed on the command line: ‚SET Global max_allowed_packet = [new value];‘. Then everything went fine and the database was created and populated.

Once I finished the further steps of the installation, I got an adminstrator account. I could log into this account with the standard password and replace this with my own one. I created a new user and configured its settings, e.g. the language setting. I took a short look at the available tools of the LMS, especially those for the learn managment. Ilias came with an impressive set of such tools by default. I’ll examine this tools and will look for additional plugins next time.

Switched A New WordPress Site Live

I worked with a small team on a WordPress website project for some month. We finished the site during the last weeks and decided to replace the old website with this new WordPress site today. Because the new website lives in a subdirectory of the webspace I had to make some edits inside the WordPress admin backend (e.g. changing some general URLs) and fix some hard coded links. This took some effort but in the end I managed to get the site live.

This project is technically done yet. I’m looking forward to some further projects using FOSS software to support the work of this organization of  volunteers.

LibreOffice Extensions Site ‚Housekeeping‘

I worked a bit inside the virtual machine which runs the LibreOffice extensions and templates website today and reordered the files and moved some of them inside new subfolders. The directory with the Plone instance is much cleaner again.

I had also a look on the content of the site and reviewed some template projects. I had to remove two of them because they didn’t fit the terms of use.

New Fix For The LibreOffice Extensions Site

I worked on an issue that a contributor to the LibreOffice extensions and templates website (https://extensions.libreoffice.org) forwarded to me. I had to investigate the source code for the connection to the uploaded documentation file for an extension and submitted a fix for this issue today the TDF github repository. The fix will be available within the next run of buildout for the LibreOffice extensions and templates website.

Python-Script To Find Projects In Review State Private

I worked on an improvement of my script to find LibreOffice extension and template projects that are in the review state private and never made it to the review queue. I’ll run that script soon and evalute the resulting lists. Maybe some of the authors have forgotten about their projects or have other issues with the publication process. Let’s see what happens.

Busy Days And Volunteer Work With WordPress

I’m currently busy with my payed day work and thus have only very small ressources for voluteer work. I met with some friends today to work on a new WordPress site. We finished some tasks and talked about the future steps and the lauch of the site. We also launched a NextCloud instance and I showed a bit of the features to my friends.

Because I’ll on another meeting they will show the site and the NextCloud instance to the whole group of local volunteers during the next weekend.