Blog

Update Extensions Website With Upgraded Plug-ins

I made some backups of the current state of all projects on the LibreOffice extensions and templates website and also created a copy of the content of the site. This took some time because I had to fight with too little disk space on the virtual machine. Thus I had to limit the amount of backup.

Once I finished the backup I run a buildout for the LibreOffice extensions and templates website and updated the plug-ins that we use to run the site on the Content Management System Plone. The upgraded plug-ins change particularly the workflow for projects and thus led to a situation where I had to check and update the review state of every project. I finished this work, which took a longer time for the extensions projects yet. I’ll work on the state of the template projects later, because I need a break now.

The change of the workflow state (e.g. to published) will send an automatic generated message to the project owner.

Python Script To Get Project State

I worked on a new Python script to get the current review state of all extension projects from the LibreOffice extensions website and write this state together with the project title and its url to a csv file.

I’ll work on a similar implementation for template projects next days.

LibreOffice-Non-Code-Extensions erstellen

Im Zusammenhang mit der Betreuung der LibreOffice webseite für Extensions (Erweiterungen) und Templates (Vorlagen) habe ich vor einiger Zeit angefangen, eine kleine Dokumentation für den Bau von LibreOffice Extensions zu schreiben, die keine Zusatzprogramme enthalten, sondern weitere Inhalte für das Office-Programm ausliefern. Dies können beispielsweise weitere Grafiken, Autokorrekturen oder Farbpaletten sein. Die Dokumentation ist ein Projekt „im Fluss“. D.h., ich werde weiter an ihr arbeiten und sie ergänzen. Hier nun die aktuelle Fassung der Dokumentation. Sie enthält auch Links zu Beispielen für die Struktur entsprechender Extensions.

Plone On Python 3 – First Try Out

The Plone team is working on a migration of the CMS to Python 3. I read about this migration and that there are good progress. Thus I decided to try the ported version out. There is a repository with a working on Github. I checked it out from https://github.com/collective/demo.plone.de. I followed the instructions in the file https://github.com/collective/demo.plone.de/blob/master/local_demo_latest_py3.cfg and it worked out. I could create a new site with Plone 5.2a1 and Python 3.6.5 (see screenshot below).

Worked Further Through Projects Review List And Fixed A String Issue

I worked to the through the review list of  the LibreOffice extensions and templates website and managed to look at the remaining projects. I sent hints to the contributors and am looking for their project site changes and updates of their release files.

I fixed some string issues inside one of the Plone add-ons that we use to drive the website. I got to this issue by an error message inside the website log. The fixes are available in the TDF Github repository yet.

New Add-On Release For The LibreOffice Extensions Website

I worked during the last days on some issues within the Plone add-on which drives the LibreOffice extensions website. I made a new release of this add-on today and published it on the ‚Cheeseshop‘ (https://pypi.org). You can get the source code of this add-on from the TDF repository on Github (https://github.com/tdf/tdf.extensionuploadcenter). I’m working on an update of the Plone add-on that drives the template part of the website and I’m going to publish a new release during the next days too.

In addition to this work  I reviewed some new LibreOffice extensions and templates projects that has been contributed during my vacation break and during the last days and published them, if they are ready for publication.

I added the current LibreOffice version 6.1 to the compatibility list for extensions and templates and sent out an information about this new version to all members of the website, thus they could update the compatibility of their extensions or templates.

Volunteers – Spare Time / Vacation?

I read a tweet during the last days that a community didn’t stop during the weekend and that make me thinking, if such a tweet would evoke the impression that a volunteer in an open source project works all day and around the clock (24/7). I got this impression because there are some people during the last days that are posting impatient messages on the work done by others.

I myself decided to limit my volunteer work to a proper amount. I’ll not extend a long working day in the office with some volunteer work in front of computer. I think an open source project should avoid to set the impression that volunteers never have to relax, sleep etc., because this helps to keep active people healthy and keep the barriers for new volunteers lower.

Vacation And Rest From The Project

I’m on vacation and take a brake from my volunteer work since the beginning of July. This brake will last at least for this month. I enjoy the current weather and the temperature in the office, when I got back to my payed day job ;-(. It’s about thirty or more degree in the rooms (and it seems that the conditions will last for about a week or more ;-(. No need to do some extra hours during the evening in front of a PC.
But it’s also not pleasant, if you read complaints like this on Twitter about TDF volunteer work and nobody stepped in: ‚(…)yet the official website for extensions is so buggy… I added an release and it wouldn’t turn up in hours.(…)‘. Make me thinking about my further volunteer work, in particular if you see in addition, that there is no line about your contributions (with investment of a lot of my spare time) in the annual report.

First Research On The Migration Of ODFAuthors With Current Data

I looked into a migration of the ODFAuthors site to a current Plone version with the data from the website yesterday. It took me a lot of hours to figure out the most easy way to do this. I tried to migrate from LinguaPlone to the new multilingual Plone plug-in first, but without success. I could update the buildout inside a test environment with the new plug-in, but I wasn’t able to migrate the content to the new framework. And even I wasn’t able to get rid of LinguaPlone. I didn’t get the option to remove it. I got always a traceback and found some users that run into the same issue without a solution. Thus I had to change my strategy. I exported the content that I need to migrate, set up a new and clean Plone 4.3.x environment and tried to updated it to the latest version of 4.3. I had to do some editing on the buildout and had to drop some Plone add-ons from the current buildout script of ODFAuthors. Once I had done this the buildout runs fine and I got a clean new Plone environment. Then I added the plug-ins plone.app.contenttypes and Products.contentmigration to the buildout script and run buildout again. I started the Plone instance, created a new Plone site and imported the content (exported from the current ODFAuthors site).
I activated the plug-in plone.app.contenttypes and run the migration scripts from Products.contentmigration. I had to migrate more than 4200 content objects and took a fair amount of time. But in the end the migration from the old Archetype content types to the new Dexterity ones was successful.
The next step would be the migration of the instance from Plone 4.3.x to Plone 5.0.x or 5.1.x.

First Step To Improve ODFAuthors

If the website ODFAuthors should be improved for the future use the first step would be the change of the localization framework from the old LinguaPlone to the current
plone.app.multilingual and migrate and reindex all content objects. It’s not possible to update the site to the latest Plone without that step.
I already created a Plone buildout for an upgraded ODFAuthors website that is based on version 5.1.x. This buildout is available from the Github repository of The Document Foundation: https://github.com/tdf/odfauthors.org