andreasma_at_LibreOffice

The annual LibreOffice conference will be held in Berlin this year. The organizer team expect a lot of proposals for talks and workshops for this event. Thus I looked around for a tool to manage this proposals with a team and make a interesting conference program out of them, but I couldn't find a tool that is adapted to our needs and easy to handle. I found in the last week an example of such a conference tool, created as an add-on for Plone. I tried this example out and started to migrate it to an full usable version. I had to rewrite some parts of the add-on and get it to work with a different structure. I have created the following "objects" now:

• a speaker or a leader of a workshop with space for some information about himself;
• the program folder (contains some tracks, it has a title and a summary and not mandatory a longer description);
• track (contains information about his topic);
• talk (with a speaker and title and description);
• workshop (with a leader and title and description).

I will continue work on that and look for some feadback from the vibrant LibreOffice community.

I attended the LibreOffice Hackfest in Hamburg last weekend. There were more than 30 hackers around. We had some interesting discussions and we hacked on the code of the office suite. The event was well organized from the Hamburg based hackers.

My goal was to enhance the PDF export dialog with missing option for setting a watermark. I get some hints from other hackers (thanks to Michael Meeks, Björn Michaelsen and Michael Stahl) and created a new section in that dialog. The user of LibreOffice has not to use a special Java program from the command line to set this option anymore. He can set the option direct in the dialog box now (see picture below). The code is in the git repository of LibreOffice and will be delivered with the next main version.



I'll work on some more enhancements of the PDF export dialog next time and update the howto about the PDF export.

We use currently for the LibreOffice Template site a Plone instance with an add-on called Plone Software Center. This add-on is also used by the Plone project to host add-on products. It has many options which fits to the needs and knowledge of developers. But some contributors of templates for LibreOffice told me that it is a bit sophisticated to them. Thus I decided to start the development of a new add-on for the LibreOffice Template site, that makes the upload of templates much easier. I named this add-on "Template Upload Center". An instance of the center will contain template projects and the user can add to the project one or more downloadable files (with a description of its features).



You will see in the screenshot above only a first step of this new add-on, but with a new design of the website.

I started with a new Plone product for the LibreOffice Template Center from scratch today. I want to make it much easier for the contributors to the template repository to upload their templates to the site.
I created the new product with the paster command and added a new archetype to the product. I uploaded my first step of the project to my repository at github.com: https://github.com/andreasma/collective.TemplateUploadCenter

It would last some month to create a first productive version.

I worked on an issue of the LibreOffice extensions site with jpeg-files. There was a package missed on the server that was added now. After a rebuild of the Plone-PIL-Package everything works smoothly. One todo less on my list.