Blog

Expensive LibreOffice Extensions And Templates Website?

I read a time ago about the myth of an expensive LibreOffice extensions and templates website. I investigated about this and had a look at the real numbers (they are public available on the wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers). I found some expenses only in two fiscal period: 2017 and 2018. TDF spent in 2017 6399.44 Euro and in 2018 642.60 Euro. The money was predominantly spent for content migration and an improved server environment. It included also an individual training for the TDF infrastructure team.

The most work on the website was done by volunteer work within some support from the Plone open source community. All in all TDF spent 7042.04 Euro for running the site for about seven and a half years, thus about 938.39 Euro per year. Seemed a very expensive tool in comparison to the financial and personal ressources used for running other TDF tools 😉

Worked Through The Plone Volto Training Documentation

I worked with the training documentation for the Plone Volto framework and played a bit with the different components. This helps to get some entry level knowledge of the framework that is based on the JavaScript React framework.

I expanded the buildout from the Volto Github repository with one of my former Plone addons: tdf.extensionuploadcenter and added a new default view for it inside my own Volto app. I use this new view to improve my knowledge on Volto.

Playing With New Plone UI Volto

I read about a new Plone UI named ‚Volto‘ and created a new instance from the Github repository: https://github.com/plone/volto

I had to install node.js and yarn on my notebook. I created a new volto package with ‚create-volto-app my-volto-app‘.  I could build my volto app with the command ’npm start‘. This build everything and the instance is available at port 3000 of your URL, e.g. ‚http://localhost:3000‘. But you need to fire up the Plone instance too with e.g. ‚bin/instance fg‘ too (otherwise you will get error messages).

Plone Volto in mobile resolution

The screenshot above shows the Plone site within a resolution for mobile devices. The Volto app uses the Pastanaga theme and is ‚mobile first‘.

FOSDEM And A1 Form?

In about two weeks many free software developers and enthusiast meet at the FOSDEM in Brussels for at least two days. They are traveling from other countries inside the European Union as well as from countries around the world to Brussels. Many developers (and some open source supporters too), which attend the event are  employed by open source companies, they are traveling to Brussels within the scope of their payed job (for different reasons) and give talks on topics around their dayly work.

If there is a connection between the the payed job of an attendee and the participation at the FOSDEM, people from inside the European Union that travel (in this case) to Belgium, Brussels need a form A1. If they didn’t own such a certificate their work runs under the rules of the Belgium social security. I explained the features of the A1 form already some weeks ago on my blog here. A connection to the daily could be e.g. a presentation with the branding of the employer or even the statement of a business trip at the hotel reception.

Worked On The Migration Of A Second Plone Addon

I finished my migration of a first Plone addon some a week ago sucessfully and started with migration of a further addon, collective.dexteritytextindexer to Python 3 compatibility. I was able to migrate the source code of the addon itself, but run into issues with the behaviors test script. The tests ran successful on Plone 4.3 to 5.2 and Python 2.7, but failed on Plone 5.2 on Python 3.

First Quarter Without Work For TDF

I did pour volunteer work for LibreOffice and its antecessor for about sixteen years. I worked in different roles for the open source project during this long periode.  The project consumed a lot of my spare time. But then I experienced a ’nice‘ communication experience inside the community (from some ‚core‘-members), that showed me a lack of respect for my project work, its value and also for my person. Thus I decided to completely stop my pour volunteer work within the project three month ago. The LibreOffice extensions and templates website (extensions.libreoffice.org) lost its maintainer and project reviewer since that time.

I used my free cycles to improve my fitness. And I was able to do this way something in balance to my day by day payed office work. Seemed it was a smart decision 😉

Finished My First Migration Of A Plone Addon To Python 3

I worked on my first migration oft a Plone addon to Python 3 during the last days. There were some instructions available on Github how to procide and I followed them. I was able to run the addon inside my local environment, but I got some issues with the continous integration test on Travis-CI, once I submitted a pull request. I had to fix the scripts inside the addon for building and testing on Travis-CI and was successful with the great support from a member of the Plone community. He merged my pull request and released a new version of the addon cioppino.twothumbs today: https://pypi.org/project/cioppino.twothumbs

Plone 5.2 From Coredev And PrintingMailHost

I usually don’t configure a mailhost for my local development environment. Thus I use the Products.PrintingMailHost to stop Plone from sending out emails and print into the shell instead.

I read about the porting work of this product/tool to Python 3 on:
https://www.starzel.de/blog/python-3-and-more and wanted to try this version out. I added the product to my buildout script ‚local.cfg‘ but without success. Buildout fetched the product and I could change its branch to ‚python3‘ but it had didn’t work. Its patch wasn’t applied to the Plone mailhost.

I solved this issue by adding ‚ENABLE_PRINTING_MAILHOST   True‘ to the ‚environment-vars =‘ entry of the ‚[instance]‘ of ‚core.cfg‘.

It looks as follows yet:

environment-vars =
        zope_i18n_compile_mo_files true
        ENABLE_PRINTING_MAILHOST True

The printing mailhost is working as expected yet.