andreasma_at_LibreOffice

The testwebsite for the LibreOffice conference (http://vm5.documentfoundation.org:9090/conference2) missed the feature to create and display conference rooms. I developed this feature yesterday and added new room objects to the Plone add-on that I used for the conference management. This new room objects will reside in a special folder (roomfolder) and will be linked from the default page of this folder. Thus the user can find them easier.
I checked in my changes to the add-on into my repository at github yesterday and uploaded them to the testwebsite today. They are available for evaluating now.

After a discussion with Florian I added some further changes to the sponsor add-on for the LibreOffice conference site. The sponsorship level is displayed only with a special label and without any amount.

There are some work left to get this add-on to the final state. Will work on this again next time.

I added some features to the test page for the LibreOffice conference in Berlin this year. There is currently a new content type call for paper available with some options for description of the process. I worked also on the sponsorship add-on. The site shows a test sponsor now. It is posible to create different levels of sponsorship, e.g. Platin, Gold, Silver, Bronze. The sponsors will be visible on every page of the conference site.

I updated and reviewed my documentation about the PDF-Export of LibreOffice yesterday. The documentation covers version 3.5 of LibreOffice now. It is currently only in German. You can get the documentation from my homepage in the file format ODT or PDF from his page.

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.

Credits for this wonderful Happy New Year graphics goes to Eliane Domingos de Sousa.

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.

The new extension center of LibreOffice (http://extensions.libreoffice.org) reached his first hundred projects today. There were some new contributions to the site in the last days. The site is setup using a Plone CMS with the add-on Plone Software Center with blobstorage-support.
There are many language tools and spellchecker dictionaries available on the site and their number is growing day by day.
If you want to contribute your free open source extension for LibreOffice, go to the site, get an account and create a new project.