Kategorie: LibreOffice

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

Extension Website With Updated Plone Add-Ons

I finished my work on the update of the two Plone add-ons which I used for the LibreOffice extensions and templates website. I published a new release for each of them. Today I updated the website with the new features of this add-ons. I run a buildout script for this. The  site was only a few minutes offline and is available already again.

It is possible to remove items from the list of available licenses without side effects for already published releases with the outdated (etc.) licenses now.

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).

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.