A designer lost in Summer of Code

Although I don’t call myself a programmer, it is always nice to have a bit of knowledge of other areas in my pocket. And when it comes to web, Design and Code are so closely related that it’s hard to know only one thing.

This year I was one of the 27 lucky GNOME students selected for the coolest program of the Summer: I’ll spend the Brazilian Winter doing lots and lots of things for GNOME. My job is to Give GNOME a first class presence on the internet, and my mentor is the great Federico.

To accomplish such a proposal, I got defined five main tasks, that involves both programming and design planning:

Make the GNOME.org fully international.

WordPress was only agreed to be used as the CMS for gnome.org if it had support for localized content. Since there were no plugins that handle content translation using gettext (to integrate it with Damned Lies and use the same process that already exists for GNOME software), Lincoln Souza and I planned a plugin to make WordPress content translatable by using xml2po. Up to now it works for most of things but I’m right now finishing the plugin implementation (in fact I did a big revamp on the plugin code last week) and working on fixing all the bugs and adding features (like a nifty admin panel). With this plugin we’ll also be able to make any other wordpress-based website translatable. You can check my daily unstable code on Github.

Create a “Projects” section in the main website

This is an old idea to have in the website. The plan is to concentrate a list of cool projects that lives inside GNOME in a way that is good for users to beautifully discover each app (as a replacement of the main page of GNOME Projects, but with cooler categories filtering and graphics — and limited to projects that are useful for end-users). Each project will have a custom entry in WordPress, that will be fully editable in the website admin. The project page will be able to have some nice content about it, screenshots, rating, latest commits and latest translations (by fetching feeds), links to its website and to its mailing list.

Reorganize developer.gnome.org. Organize the content and give sufficient infrastructure for easy access and administration of this kind of information.

I still need to get in touch with the guys who take care of this. With the new developer.gnome.org, we got great improvement, but there is room for a lot more. Part of the idea to work on this comes from this discussion from Shaun McCance. His initial idea is to have an instance of WordPress that serves as a home for the development subdomain and other pages.

Migrate all the subdomains of the GNOME website to use the new layout, and polish each one to look integrated with the rest of the website ecosystem.

This is low priority, but it’s still on the list. The item is self explanatory . This is the current list I have of the subdomains that need love:

• live.gnome.org
• l10n.gnome.org
• git.gnome.org
• bugzilla.gnome.org

Create a new area on GNOME website that will focus on Community

This is be the most fun part of my proposal . My idea is to create a new subdomain in the GNOME website (maybe call it “community”, or “world” — as suggested by diegoe) that will group three things:

1. The full list of members, located in the globe map (replacing this to use a much more dynamic system).
2. Real time popping up balloons of what is happening in GNOME right now (including commits, blog posts, bug reports, wiki edits and translations). This can be done by integrating XML-RPC, REST or fetching RSS feeds will all those services. The geolocation would be known by the association of the email address. For example, if vdepizzol at gmail.com commits something, the system will know that this was done at Vitória, Brazil. The system will also have an area where the user can add himself, informing his email and other personal data. An admin area must be created to handle approval of such adds and to other minor edits.
3. Provide a home for local groups. Now that the main website will be fully translatable, we need to find a place to keep the pages of the local groups around the world. And this subdomain looks like a great place for that.

It seems I’ll have an exciting winter . As you can see most of what I’m going to do for Summer of Code is still under planning. Any feedback, idea or suggestion is more than welcome!

In the following days I’ll start to post regularly about the status of each task, and what I’ll be working on. At the moment I’m working on WPPO plugin (for translation support in GNOME.org), and you can keep the updates on WPPO repository on Github.