Kategorie: Freie Software

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 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

New Buildout For ODFAuthors Nearly Finished

I worked very hard on the new Plone buildout for the ODFAuthors website during the last days. I nearly finished the buildout today. I created a new policy and a theming product for the site. I added a template for the frontpage of the new website and am waiting for the input about the content, that the new frontpage should show.

I also need some suggestions on the new publication workflow of the site. The Plone workflow tool is able to run very subtle grained ones.  The Plone Content Management System is also able to send automatic messages on all events like changing the workflow state.

Installation Of OpenSUSE Leap 15.0

I installed the latest OpenSUSE Leap distribution to a notebook. The installation tooks about half an hour and the new KDE Plasma desktop looks very well. It’s always easy and fast to install a new Linux distro these days. If I would have tried to do the same with a current MS Windows on the same machine, I wouldn’t have finished yet (but not sure, if the machine would be able to run a current version).

Continious Integration For New Plone Environment Passed

I worked on an update of my new Plone environment to the current version 5.1.x today. I had to add and edit some files to my git repository. I got a successful local build first. I added a travis.yml file to the repository and enabled the building process on Travis. It needed some further edits but in the end it builds on Travis too and the new development buildout for an updated odfauthors site showed a green button.

Creating A New Plone Development Environment

I worked on the first bits for a new Plone development environment. I’ll use this to create a new website for the ODFAuthors team. The new site should run on Plone 5.1 or later. Maybe it is possible to upgrade the site to a Plone version that runs on Python 3.

I read already on a blog of a Plone developer that Core-Plone is already ported to Python 3, but that there are a big bunch of tests that are not yet ported and need some love (and work time).

View From Outside An Inner Circle

The perception of an organization most often differs between people who are members of the inner circle and the public (public area of the organization). As a member of the inner circle oneself may have a belief about this view from 10 thousend feet hight, but that’s often only an idea. So am I.

If you are inside the inner circle you get a lot of messages, take place in discussions and had to decide on some topics. You share the impression that the leading body of your organization is always busy and take action for the organizations good.

I left the inner circle (due to no further candidacy) some month ago and got a different view now. I got  – like others in the (organization) public – only little or no information about the work of the bodies of the organization (not even about the next meeting time etc. of the leading body).  This opens my eyes and I’m able to comphrehend the view of other project members much better now. Thus I’m very happy that I took the decision to not stand for a candidacy again. It’s always good to change your view, thus you could understand the other position (view).

 

Python 2 Support Stopps In About 1 And A Half Year

The Plone developers work hard to port the CMS to Python 3 before the support for Python 2 ends. This will be in about 1 and a half year from now. LibreOffice made this step a longer time ago and comes currently with Python 3.5.4. Thus the LibreOffice Python programming environment and connection will get updates and security fixes after the end of 2019 too.

If you use another office suite with Python support you should take a closer look into the supported / delivered version. If it is not Python 3 yet have an eye on alternatives in time.

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.