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Open Collaboration Services and KDE Forums

Einar — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 10:00:39 +0000

For KDE developers, web-based forums are often uncommon workflows. Indeed, for communication among developers mailing lists are much better tools, especially since you can handle everything inside a client (most of the time), compared to forums where you have to use a web browser. The ways of reading, replying and interacting with posters are dramatically different. And that is why some developers find themselves uncomfortable with the KDE Community Forums.

A dedicated application would be usually much better than a browser, because you can work around the intrinsic limitations of the browser itself. The problem is that you can’t really access a forum with anything else than a browser. That is, it used to be like this, but now things are changing.

In the past months fellow administrator bcooksley has been working quite hard implementing the Open Collaboration Services (OCS) specification in the KDE Community Forums. For the uninformed, it’s the same API that powers OpenDesktop.org and related web pages. This means that you could access the forum contents programmatically using a REST API and parsing the XML that is returned by the service.

Unfortunately, bcooksley had no time to implement a client that would make use of this newly-made service.

That’s where I stepped in. This morning I committed in the kde-forum-mods repository the first implementation of a backend to access the forums’ OCS service. Currently it’s extremely basic – just a few classes to wrap the XML responses into decent data representation, and a basic class to perform reading requests: that means that technically it is possible to request forum listings, thread listing, and posts. I’m still working on the ability of replying and posting messages.

Being a Pythonista, the backend is written entirely in Python: currently it uses the standard library plus dateutil and lxml to do its bidding, but the next steps would be to turn it into a PyKDE4 library to access all the KDE related goodness (hello, KIO!). Bear in mind that currently there is no application using this: I merely completed (part of) the backend.

If you’re interested, the code can be found on gitorious.org, in the ocs-client directory, branch experimental, inside the kde-forum-mods repository.

What’s cooking at the KDE Community Forums?

Einar — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 11:56:51 +0000

In the past weeks and days, the KDE Community Forums staff has been working to bring new features to improve even more the user experience. A few months ago, the staff was discussing the idea of finding a way to guide users to the most appropriate forum to post their questions or discussions. Now, thanks also to the return in service of one of our admins (welcome back, sayakb!) the feature is now being implemented, as the screenshots below will show.

Bear in mind that everything for now is running on a testing server, to make sure it doesn’t break anything. Once the tests and the implementation are complete, we’ll integrate the feature in the forums. How soon we are not sure, but it won’t be too long.

"Help me post a topic"

Upon logging in, you will be greeted by a new "New Post" button:

You can either click on the arrow to quickly post an idea for Brainstorm, a new discussion, access the "getting started" forum or contact the staff:

Or if you just click on the button itself, you access the guided post section:

The "Share an idea" and "Chat and discuss" buttosn will bring you to the relevant forums (Brainstorm and Discussions and Opinions), while "Ask a question" will bring about an additional screen:

You’ll be able to select your favorite application and you’ll be able to post directly in the relevant forum.

Open Collaboration Services

But that’s not all. Thanks to the hard work of Ben Cooksley (fellow admin and System Settings maintainer) there is also an implementation of the Open Collaboration Services (OCS), the same system that powers the well-known Get Hot New Stuff connected to OpenDesktop.org. This will mean, in principle, that you could access forum posts and discussions in a programmatic way, using a REST API. This opens up possibilities like Brainstorm plasmoids, other means to access the forum (like an Akonadi resource – there’s some ongoing work in KDE SVN). If you’re interested in testing the OCS for the forum (or if you want to develop some kind of application that ties to the forums themselves), let us know on IRC (#kde-forum on freenode).

A brand new look for KDE Community forums

Einar — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:18:47 +0000

Today, a major upgrade of the KDE Community Forums took place. The change brings quite a number of changes to the forums themselves, and it’s a further step towards providing a better experience for KDE users (and developers too!).

The new forums, powered by phpBB, have a whole new theme, heavily inspired by KDE 4.3’s “Air” Plasma theme:

Not only the looks have improved, however. A number of features have been added:

The ability of tagging a specific thread;
A new, improved reputation system;
A friends connection system where you can mark other users as friends and interact more easily with them;

The popular section “KDE Brainstorm” has also received improvements, such as the ability of having a neutral vote, an improved voting pad, and a brand new look to match the one of the forums.

As a final note, we would like to thank phpBB developers cs278, naderman and NeoThermic for their kind assistance and great support during the migration process. Thanks a lot!

Take a tour around the new KDE Community Forums, and let us know what you think!