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!

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.

• We did allow the user can choose to login to the forum using Identity credentials, but the user had to manually click on a checkbox saying “Login using KDE Identity” in order to do that. Of course, we saved the state of the checkbox, but when I think of seamless integration, I imagine that the decision of which authentication system to use needn’t be made by the end user (openID logins are a different thing, there’s no username/password involved at all there, unlike SSO).
• When logging in for the first time, the user had to go through a ‘link your accounts’ screen. Now since we couldn’t merge the forum DB and LDAP due to a lot of conflicts, we are stuck with two databases. On this link screen, the user could link it with an existing forum account (by keying in the credentials for that), or create a new local account (which was confusing. Why should John Doe create another account when he already created one on KDE Identity?).
• We allowed the user to register on forum.kde.org — again giving way to confusion. We say that we support SSO, while we still give the user two different websites where he can register. That’s not SSO.

So what did we do? We designed this new workflow:

• No “Login using identity” checkbox. We now use dual authentication (both DB and LDAP), so authenticate with any credential you want to on the same prompt.
• We still have to keep the link screen, but we gave it a less confusing name, we changed its name to ‘display username’. We also removed unneeded fields like email and password from this screen as an Identity user will not really need a local password (and we can use his Identity email address). We also have an option for the user to choose an auto-generated username.
• We disabled registration on forum.kde.org and redirected all registrations to KDE Identity.

We can describe the whole registration process functionally as follows:

• User visits the forum and clicks on registration link
• User registers on KDE Identity
• Then he comes back to the login page (we’ll find a way soon to bring him back automatically)
• User logs in with the account he just created
• On the ‘display username’ prompt, if he is happy with the auto generated display username, he simply clicks on “Complete registration” without having to enter his password or email address.

We hope the new workflow will integrate the forum deeply with KDE Identity. If you come across any issues, please report it on Bugzilla for the component forum.kde.org.

Link to the official announcement: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=106886

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.

• 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

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!

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?

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

Linking accounts

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