Autor: Andreas Mantke

Last Day Of TDF-Membership

I decided to not renew my application for a membership of The Document Foundation some weeks ago. I did this because leading members of the foundation communicated badly about my volunteer work for the foundation and LibreOffice during the last eight years and nobody from the board of the foundation stopped this. For this reason I stopped my contributions to The Document Foundation in last October.

I got also the feeling that some leading people of the foundation are not able to communicate openly and that it often works like a closed group with mostly interests in LibreOffice business (and income from it). The latter was not my main objective.

Commendation Without Exact Knowledge?

It’s always no good idea to thank someone without the exact knowledge about the real work he or she had done and the exact period he or she were on duty. Such a commendation – especially in a published report or in a public speech looks to the one who get it the opposite, because it reflects that it is not worth the time to collect and check the correct data.

I read such commendation about my work on the LibreOffice extensions and templates website in the annual report of The Document Foundation today. I invested a lot of my spare time to work as a pure volunteer for the foundation and on the website for about eight years (I worked for about sixteen years inside the community of the free office software project).

Working On The Code Of A New Plone Add-On

I worked on a new Plone add-on during the last weeks. I created this add-on within a Python 3 environment. It runs within a Plone 5.2 instance. During the coding of the new add-on I run into an issue in connection with Zope 4 and filed a bug report.

The code of my new Plone add-on need some further testing and further coding. The add-on provides an environment to upload templates and publish them.

Communicate Agenda Late And Get No Guests

<satire mode>
It’s always interesting to see the communication strategy (?) of a board. Don’t publish an agenda of a public meeting to early (only the evening before the event) to certainly avoid to get people from the public into your (public) board call.

The next communication step should be to complain about the lack of participation from the public.
</satire mode>

If the communication of a board follows this road it has not to wonder about a lack of participation from the public. The public wouldn’t feel invited.

Search Implementation On A Website – Difficult?

If you run a new website there is most often a small amount of content at its start. But later the content is growing and users may get an issue to find the content they are looking for. That’s the time when a good build in live search is needed latest.

But it would be the best solution to have such live search already implemented before you go live with your website. And if you expect your website to grow fast you need a very capable live search.

I created such a website together with a service provider for the LibreOffice extensions and templates repository. The site is build on Plone with some add-ons. The Plone Content Management System (CMS/DMS) already provides a build in fast live search. The search is already running by default. There is no need for another implementation of a live search or search function except possibly very big or special environments. But for such cases there are add-ons available in the Plone add-on repository to get e.g. Apache Solr integrated within your Plone installation.

New AddOn Releases For The LibreOffice Extensions And Templates Website

I worked on improvements of the Plone addons for the LibreOffice extensions and templates website during last time. I finished this work yet with two new releases of the addons. There is one of them for the extensions part of the site and another one for the templates part. The new feature of both addons is mail form to get in contact with the author of an extension or a template and give the author some feedback. The mail forms are protected with a recaptcha.

The releases are available on the ‚cheesehop‘ (https://pypi.org):
– https://pypi.org/project/tdf.extensionuploadcenter
– https://pypi.org/project/tdf.templateuploadcenter/

This releases would be probably the last ones, because The Document Foundation want to change the environment for the extensions and templates website to another software.

I already explained in different contextes that I had to limit my volunteer engagement for The Document Foundation in my spare time to give other topics more room (e.g. family and sport). I stated that my contributions include only the maintenance of the current LibreOffice extensions and templates website running on Plone. My work on the website stopped already in October 2018 for communication issues. I did some work on the addons, that I developed for The Document Foundation, since then. But with the decision of The Document Foundation to drop the current LibreOffice extensions and templates website soon, I see no need to further develop the addons within the current setting. I’ll rethink if and how to proceed (most probably in another environment etc.).

Anerkennung der zwei Projekte (Staaten)?

Es ist interessant zu lesen, dass für ein (oder mehrere?) Community-Mitglied(er) eines Forks eines Open Source Projekts ein Essential die Anerkennung des Vorhandenseins von zwei Projekten ist. Dies erinnert mich an die Geschichte meines Heimatlandes, Deutschland. Da hat der eine deutsche Staat auch die Anerkennung der Koexistenz von zwei Staaten als Bedingung für gute Beziehungen als notwendig angesehen. Heute gibt es keine zwei Staaten in Deutschland mehr, sondern nur der eine ist dem anderen beigetreten. Mal sehen, ob jemand bzw. wer den Mumm in der zweiten Community hat, diese Lösung auch im Open Source Bereich der von LibreOffice und Apache OpenOffice voranzutreiben.

Ich hoffe nur, dass der Prozess nicht die gleiche Zeitspanne braucht wie zum Start des Vereinigungsprozesses der beiden deutschen Staaten (also mehr als 40 Jahre). Dann wird es eher einen Bundesstaat Europa, in Vielfalt vereint, geben, als ein gemeinsames  Projekt und eine Community der beiden Projekte. Die Europäer hatten vor 60 Jahren mehr Willen und Mut, eine gemeinsame Zukunft zu gestalten.

Worked On An Author Contact Form

I worked on a new  mail form to send feedback to an author of a project. The email address of the project author (contact) is not public visible, thus it has to be added to the mail template by the new mail form module. The user of the website has only to fill in the name of the project into a field. The rest is done by a Plone portal_catalog search.

The new mail form includes also a recaptcha validation to protect the site against robot spam. The code for the mail form is published on github.com:
https://github.com/tdf/tdf.templateuploadcenter inside the account of The Document Foundation (TDF). I’ll add some further additions and publish a new release of the Plone addon during the next days. If the new release should be used on the LibreOffice templates website a member of the TDF infra team would need to run an update on the TDF server.

The Document Foundation – No Review Of LibreOffice Extensions

I saw today that someone has published extensions on the LibreOffice extensions website that had been submitted to the review queue. But after a quick look on this newly published LibreOffice extensions it was clear that they never had been reviewed by The Document Foundation or a volunteer of the project. It seemed only an administrator of the website pushed a button without any look on the content he published.

Because the LibreOffice extensions website runs on ressource of The Document Foundation and is under the control of the foundation such a ‚workflow‘ is very dangerous for this entity. I wouldn’t expect such an behavior from an entity that declares itself one of the biggest and best world wide open source projects.

Plone And Single Sign On / LDAP

It’s always a shame if people present at a tech conference without the necessary knowledge on the background. The LibreOffice extensions and templates website had never a single sign on solution, because there were no such solution within the LibreOffice available. This situation persists when the LibreOffice extensions and templates website was migrated to the current infrastructure with a rework. Thus the migration of the user of the site was also done without e.g. a migration to a LDAP solution.

The Document Foundation staff member, which presented about the future of the LibreOffice extensions site at the FOSDEM in Brussels, seemed to have no knowledge about this situation and also not about available solutions for LDAP integration for Plone (the Content Management System the current website run on). This illuminated the carefullness, the presenter dedicated to evaluate the current situation and the future of the LibreOffice extensions repository.

Maybe the time has been much better spent to improve the communication style inside The Document Foundation and for the review of already for publication submitted LibreOffice extension projects?

And about the LDAP integration of Plone: a bit of Googleing would have been of great help 😉