My space in the world

Today, we finished upgrading one of the most visited KDE websites: KDE.News. The Dot now not only runs on drupal’s latest release (7.15), but also has a fresh new look featuring the Neverland theme.

KDE.News

The main aim of this theme is to serve a clean yet beautiful interface. We’ve taken extra care in having the views pixel perfect.

As always, if you find any issues with the upgrade or with the theme, please file a bug report. Happy reading!

Yesterday after a long head banging session with Ingo Malchow, we’re happy to release the first version of the Neverland UI for KDE Wikis (userbase.kde.org, techbase.kde.org and community.kde.org). Being one of the most complex sites (both architecture and content wise), we realize that there are some loose ends that need to be tied up in the new interface, and we are working on them.

Neverland is a simple yet very powerful interface that is gradually becoming the face of all KDE websites. So far, off the top of my head, 10 KDE websites including the wikis are now serving a variant of the Neverland theme.

Ingo also updated UserBase to the latest MediaWiki release. So we now have a more solid website with our latest and greatest theme. More sites soon to join the Neverland family.

A few weeks back, Teo called out for volunteers to work on an application for managing the workflow during programs like Season of KDE (our own version of google-melange). After two weeks of intensive coding, we now have our very own application!

The application has been titled “KDE Students Program” (codename Pandora) and will be available at season.kde.org after a while. My primary aim was to make something that is not only easy to use, but easy to maintain. So what does it do?

• It allows creation of multiple programs, with more than one active at one point of time.
• It provides an option for users to sign up as a student or a mentor. A mentor application has to be approved by a SoC admin.
• Students can submit one or more proposals. Approved mentors can select projects they want to mentor.
• Once the student application deadline is hit, SoC admins will go through all proposals and accept/reject them.
• Once the coding period starts, the mentors will then coordinate with their students.
• Upon completion of the program, mentors will evaluate the students’ performance and mark them as passed/failed accordingly.

Program Home

Project Details

Submit a proposal

So as you see, the workflow is quite simple. Of course, there are quite a few other stuff that are available to SoC admins, but I won’t get into all that. The application is wired up our central login system KDE Identity and has been built on the Neverland UI.

If you wish to test and try to break the application, the source code is available here: projects.kde.org/season-kde-org
If you can’t / don’t want to install it locally, ping me on IRC (nick sayakb on #kde-www) and I’ll share a (private) link where you can test the application.

Last month, Ingo Malchow blogged about Bugzilla and Neverland. I’m happy to announce that another site was added to the Neverland category: the KDE Community Forums have been migrated to our new Neverland theme and also undergone a major revamp at the same time. The main changes are:

• KDE Brainstorm has been fully integrated with the forum: a decision was reached to discontinue the old software due to maintenance reasons. The voting interface is still partly driven by AJAX, but the rest of the interface has been merged with the main forum structure.
• Collapsible forums: You can now hide the categories that you don’t use.
• Visual navigation: Jump through various sections on a page without having to scroll.
• Hierarchical navigation: Go through a folder’s hierarchy using the new tree style navigation.
• A new look for the user profile and control panel.
• A re-designed online friends system and an easy way to send them messages.
• Context based navigation everywhere for a clutter-free UI

… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We are really excited about the release and we hope you like using it. If you encounter any bugs with the new design, please file a bug report at bugs.kde.org under the forum.kde.org component.

Here’s a link to the official announcement: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?t=101660
Take a tour of Neverland here: http://forum.kde.org/tour.php

A week post the expected release date, I finally announce KDE Identity integration for the KDE Wikis. This means now, you can log into UserBase, TechBase and Community Wiki with your KDE Identity credentials.

So how do you use it? Start with clicking on the OpenID / Identity Login link at the bottom of the sidebar. On the login page, choose KDE Identity, and enter your Identity credentials (if you don’t have one already, register here). You’ll be taken to a page where you can either link your Identity account with an existing user on the wiki, or create a new user. And you’re done!

Important: If you are an existing OpenID user on any of these wikis, and you originally created your account using an OpenID provider, you may not have a password at all. So linking to your existing account will not be possible from the login prompt. In such cases, log into the wiki with your existing OpenID account, go to My Preferences, click on the OpenID tab and click on the Add new OpenID link at the bottom in the Logins associated with your account section. That should let you add your Identity account to your existing account.

Please note that this is a beta release of the plugin. It will be much appreciated if you file a bug in case you find one!

Well, the title is misleading. It isn’t actually dead (or the former ain’t alive either, technically )

But it’s quite funny how the widgets show my CPU and RAM usage:

Well, on a technical end, I am fine with the RAM usage, it’s not even 50%. But the CPU spikes isn’t what makes me very comfortable. ‘top’ says that’s it’s Amarok that causes them. Amarok in general uses resources quite efficiently. But the collection scanner is what that causes this spike. Is it the fact that my collection is on a NTFS drive? Should I be worried about that?

That will be #kde-www on freenode. What do we do there? Well, pretty much everything! Starting from meetings to general discussions. And we recently merged #kde-forum with #kde-www. We also have our own IRC bot that announces KDE Forum posts to the channel (if you want that for your channel, just ask!).

Are you a web enthusiast? Do you code kickass web scripts? Do you think Chuck Norris is awesome? You know where to find us.

The plugin is finally complete! Now, anyone with or without a forum account can use his/her Identity credentials. They plugin will then ask you whether you wish to merge it with an existing account, or create a new one. Creating a new account is as simple as filling in four text boxes. Please also note that these are one time activities, i.e. once you gave linked you account with your Identity user, you’ll be able to login with your Identity credentials. What more, the plugin also remembers your last choice (whether to use Identity login, or not) and hence, saves time.

Linking accounts

Official announcement: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=95983
KDE Community Forums homepage: http://forum.kde.org

Notice: See updated post: http://www.sayakbanerjee.com/2011/07/14/identity-for-kde-forum-update/

KDE Community Forum (forum.kde.org) now has an option that lets you log in using your KDE Identity (identity.kde.org) credentials. The feature isn’t fully finished yet, and has a partial implementation as of now.

To use your Identity credentials, you must have a forum account for now. You can go to the User control panel -> Profile -> Account settings to link your Identity username with your forum account. Once done, you can then log into the forum with your Identity credentials by checking “Log in using KDE Identity” option on the login page.

Soon, it will also have the option to link an account right from the login page and/or create a new user.

So what’s going on behind the curtains? A lot of stuff. Planning, long spreadsheets, and exciting discussions. In a nutshell, we’re trying to make sure that the event is a big hit! And how far are we? Well..

• We opened delegate registrations two weeks back: http://conf.kde.in/register
• We’ve got powerful keynote speeches: http://conf.kde.in/keynotes
• We’ve listed some warm and cozy hotels for the conference: http://conf.kde.in/accommodation
• And finally, we have created a nifty media page so that you get all KDE-India and conf.kde.in graphics: http://conf.kde.in/media/

Hmm, that’s all from the top of my head. Oh and you might know that I hang out in the KDE webby world. And if you’re a web guy as well, you should attend the webteam talk by Ingo Malchow. And of course, we have a pretty long list of promising talks that you can find here: http://conf.kde.in/talks/. Just pick what suits you!

Lastly, if you haven’t registered already, quickly follow the registration link above and get your tickets to the conference. Don’t forget to spread the word

See you at conf.kde.in