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).

I knew already that the various ioslaves can store metadata, consisting of key-value pairs which are specific on the slave used. Normally you can get the whole map by accessing the metaData function of the job you have used, in the slot connected from the result signal. For some reason, however, in PyKDE4 calling metaData() triggers an assert in SIP, which ends in a crash (at least in my application; I stil need to debug further). KIO jobs have also the queryMetaData function, which returns the value of the key you have queried. Unfortunately, there was no way I could find the name.

Thus began my search for the right key. Googling didn’t help, and on IRC I got the first answers I needed but not enough to reach the goal. Until I saw a commit by David Faure in trunk/kdelibs/kio/ which touched a file called DESIGN.metadata (link is for the branch version). After checking with webSVN, that was exactly the thing I was looking for! It lists all the keys for the metadata, indicating also to which ioslave they begin. After that, the solution was easy.

Of course I’m not leaving you hanging there and now I’ll show you how, in PyKDE4, you can quickly check for the server response:

from PyKDE4.kio import KIO
from PyQt4.QtCore import SIGNAL
[...]

class my_widget(QWidget):
[...]

    def check_address(self, url):

        # You can add optional flags such as KIO.HideProgressInfo
        job = KIO.get(KUrl(url))
        self.connect(job, SIGNAL("result (KJob *)"), self.slot_result)

    def slot_result(self, job):

        if job.error():
            # Bail out if there's an error
            return    

        # Get the HTTP response through queryMetaData
        http_response = job.queryMetaData("responsecode")
        print "Got response: %s" % unicode(http_response)

This snippet does a few things. Firstly, it gets the specified URL, using KIO.get (KIO.stat doesn’t set the required metadata). Notice that the call is not wrapped in the new-style PyQt API because result (KJob *) isn’t wrapped like that (there’s a bug open for that). In any case, the signal passes to the connecting slot (slot_result) where we first check if there’s an error (perhaps the address didn’t exist?) and then we use queryMetaData("responsecode") to get the actual response code.

If you want to do error checking basing on the result, bear in mind that KIO operates asynchronously, so you should use a signal to tell your application that the result is what it expected or not.

I wonder if this should be documented in Techbase…

Well, it took me more than a month to get this thing done… I didn’t spend every day coding, but it was a challenge. Glad it’s over now, which means that Danbooru Client 0.5 is finally available. Grab it at the usual place on kde-apps.org.

Changes in this version:

• Massive code refactoring and documentation
• Support for multiple pages: the same query can be repeated multiple pages (shown in a tabbed interface), kind of like browsing the actual Danbooru board;
• Rating information added to the API;
• Support for translations (thanks to Pino "pinotree" Toscano for the help): the tarball now contains a .pot file which can be used for translating Danbooru Client. If you make a translation, send the .po file my way and I’ll include it in the next version.

Improvements that I have in the queue:

• Suppport for pools (every board out there changes the API, so it will require some work);
• Support for storing password/username using KWallet (through python-keyring, so it works even without KWallet installed);
• Review usability of the dialogs (I have a separate branch for that);
• Improve the image download dialog.

On recent KDE SC versions (4.4 beta 2 and onwards) there are some painting issues with regards to the thumbnails, but I’m not sure if the fault is in PyKDE4 or in the underlying libraries. Nothing too bad, luckily: hovering the thumbnails or giving focus to the thumbnail view should be what’s needed.

Here’s a screenshot of the new interface (click to enlarge):

Comments and suggestions are always welcome, so don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

As a final word, some thoughts on the work required to get this out of the door. My largest issues are related to garbage collection: Python’s reference counting based GC got a lot in the way, at least because of how the underlying C++ structures work. I had to work a bit to keep references to objects around so I wouldn’t get crashes (accessing an already deleted object). All is well now, and I think my Python/PyQt/PyKDE4 knowledge gained from it. I keep telling myself that I should be writing some tutorials one day…

Today, the KDE Community Forums would like to provide the opportunity to answer those questions by annoucing the continuation of the tutorial courses known as Klassrooms.

What are Klassrooms?

Klassrooms are tutorial “lessons” held in a specific area of the forum. Held by one or more “mentors”, they are focused in guiding people through helping KDE by tackling a particular problem. Examples of such problems include:

• Fixing simple bugs in an application
• Taking junior jobs in a specific project
• Helping with documentation
• Promotion work (for example, screencasts)
• Helping with translations

As you can see, Klassrooms are not limited to coding at all.

Usually the sessions last from one to two weeks, with a maximum of 5 “students” participating. The work is coordinated in a specific area of the forum.

Public call for mentors

The key to hold Klassrooms is having mentors. Their role is to present the problem and guide students through the course. Compared to a live session, using the forum requires less time, and both the students and the mentor can set their most convenient schedule.

That is why we need you! You don’t need to be a developer: non-coding courses are as welcome as coding ones. How do you become a mentor? These guidelines explain everything that is needed to apply.

If you feel like helping, this is the perfect opportunity. Let us know!

The first encounter worked out pretty well, actually. I went with the others to have a dinner out, and I got to talk to “famous” KDE people such as Troy, Lydia, or Jos. I also had the nice opportunity to meet up with my fellow forum administrator neverendingo, and we discussed a bit on how to improve the forums. In short, the evening was really nice. I even got to see a N900! I thought I’d never see that. A very nice piece of hardware, I’d say.

The following morning, aside a little incident (the other people forgot about me!) I walked up to KONSEC where the meeting was held. While Cornelius led the discussion (the Dot will have more details in due time), I worked on helping out with a promo booklet the team is making. I’m used to writing, but writing in an appealing way to a less specialized audience is much harder. Thanks go to Jos who got me on the right track.

Then part of the people moved to another room to discuss about getting new contributors to KDE while I stayed with Jos and Stuart to work on other material. It was a little draining, but very productive overall. I am actually happy to be part of this, for a change, rather than passively reading about it on the web. It’s nice to give something back to your favorite project, as little as may be.

Lastly, we went out for a dinner in an Indian restaurant (nice food, not too much though), and we went back (with Eckhart showing us innovative ways to get back by changing multiple subway trains). And here I am, writing a small report of this day.

It’s been a very positive experience so far. I finally saw more people who use KDE, and they’re also both fun and nice. Now it’s time for bed, I still have a good half of a day for work before I get back.

Once you save the file, however, all the tags are just present in your file name, and nowhere else. LIke that, they’re not that informative. That’s where danbooru2nepomuk comes into play. danbooru2nepomuk is a small Python program that can turn the tags present into the filenames into real semantic tags.

Requirements

As of this post, danbooru2nepomuk works only on Linux, so if you are a Windows user, you’re out of luck. Also, it requires a KDE (tested with version 4.3.1).

danbooru2nepomuk is a Python program, so it requires first of all the Python interpreter, version 2.5 or later. It has been developed to use the Nepomuk semantic desktop framework present in KDE, so you’ll also need PyQt4 and PyKDE4, along with a working Nepomuk installation. Most distributions use the broken Soprano redland backend, which will not work, so I suggest you to switch to the sesame2 backend, which (although dependent on Java) works reasonably well.

Download and installation

Simply get danbooru2nepomuk.zip, rename it to .py from .zip, save it in your PATH, and make it executable. Nothing more than that.

Usage

danbooru2nepomuk is a command line appplication. Its syntax is simple:

danbooru2nepomuk.py [-r] <file or directory>

If you specify a file, it will be tagged directly; if you specify a directory, it will be scanned for files, and those in turn will be tagged. If you add the -r switch to a directory, it will be scanned recursively, while it will be simply ignored if you use it with a file.

Configuration

You can specify a tag blacklist for tags in the filename that you don’t want to get in. To do so, edit the TAGS_BLACKLIST variable on line 41, and add more tags you don’t want Nepomuk to pick up.

Known issues

None that I know of, at least! If you find any, let me know.

danbooru2nepomuk is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

A good part of the KDE community knows at least little about Nepomuk, and its ability to attach semantic tags to your files – basically words that describe the file, be it an image, a text document, or anything you’d like. For example, you could tag all the photos from your vacation with the name of the place you’ve been. After that, you can recall tagged files by accessing the nepomuksearch://hasTag:TAG_NAME url in Dolphin or Konqueror (there are more advanced uses, but I won’t cover them here), where TAG_NAME is your tag.

Up to now, the usual way to tag files was to either select them in batch and add a tag, or do them individually, then click “Add tag”, then select the tag or create a new one. It was kind of laborious, although not too complicated. And that’s where Drop2Tag comes in.

Drop2Tag stays in your desktop, configured for one of your Nepomuk tags. Then, you just need to drag files to it to have them automatically tagged. Also, clicking on the big Nepomuk icon will open your file manager with the nepomuksearch://hasTag URL with the selected tag. Neat.

The plasmoid is written in Python (I’ve taken a look at its source) and despite being very early in development, it already does the job very nicely – I have put one on my “Graphics manipulation” desktop activity to tag photos and images. A nice addition would be to select the tag from the plasmoid itself, rather than using the configuration option – it would make things much more flexible. Perhaps a Plasma.ComboBox would do the job here.

In any case, I’d like to congratulate its author (nik3nt3) for a job well done.

Scripted language bindings (that have a lower barrier of entry) for KDE exist: on top of my memory I can list Python, Ruby, and C# (and I’ve probably missed a few). Despite that, the only official non-C++ programs that are in KDE’s SVN currently, including only what’s in the official modules, are system-config-printer-kde and printer-applet, which are written in PyKDE. This is quite striking to me, because the language bindings allow full access to the API in kdelibs, and thus allow the creation of applications with (theoretically) less effort on part of the writer. Yet, such applications, despite the bindings being rather mature, are lacking.

Why is so? By applying Occam’s razor, Ithink that this is because most of the current KDE contributors are C++ coders. I seem to recall, though, a debate when system-config-printer-kde and printer-applet were introduced, where discussion arose between “pro-scripting” people and “anti-scripting” people. The major complaint is of course performance, as scripting languages are rarely at the level of C++. Still, I think that a more diverse language ecosystem would benefit KDE by making possible the arrival of new contributors that are not necessarily well-versed into C++. In some cases, such as Plasma, having programs directly written in scripting languages is a guarantee of less crashes dn more security. In the end, KDE would really benefit from it.

Before someone flames, let me state that I’m not advocating a reduction of C++ based programs in KDE. Just more choice. FOSS is all about it, right?

EDIT: After reading Richard Moore’s comment I thought I’d clarify my point. It is true that core modules need to stay C++ only to avoid more dependencies in the chain, but at the same time I feel that KDE does not stress enough that you can write applications (that can live well outside the core, for example in extragear) in languages that are not C++. This can be a limit for contributions from people that “do not speak” C++.

The new interface resembles the IdeaTorrent sites, but it is still powered by the forum software (phpBB), a clear example of the flexibility of the platform. Posting new ideas, voting, commenting and filtering the lists is now extremely easy and requires just a few mouse clicks.

For those who have Javascript-enabled browsers, the KDE Brainstorm sports a complete AJAX interface. In case Javascript is not available, the interface gracefully degrades to a non-AJAX version, making it useful even for people who do not want to run Javascript in their browsers.

Aside from the new looks, the KDE Brainstorm keeps its strong foundations: the Idea Moderators, whose hard work is essential to pre-screen and approve the ideas, the KDE Community Forums staff to keep the system up and runing, and of course the KDE community.

Check out the new Brainstorm, and let us know what you think!

The reason is mostly practical: it takes a bit of work to collect and add information, and currently my free time is limited due to a rather heavy workload and some other commitments. As UserBase is a wiki, I thought I could ask the KDE community at large if I could get some help in having a new version ready before release.

The big advantage is that you don’t need any special coding skills, just a knowledge of Plasma and being able to run 4.3 (RC2 at this stage). I have already made a skeleton page: people can edit bits of information, removing outdated items and adding new ones. Also, Aaron’s excellent screencast can be used to see which new features are in Plasma.

If you have wondered how to help KDE without being able to code, this is a good opportunity to do so!