GSoC Weekly Update #5

This winter I’m part of Google Summer of Code: I’m working on improving the GNOME website. You can check all of my tasks here.

Another late summary. Same excuse. Final tests are finally about to end by the end of next week.

Among the plans of the week, my list consisted of finishing the Applications area for the GNOME website and starting on the Community site. Even with plenty of University works and tests, I managed to get all my gsoc plans in time (this summary had to wait — for a good cause ).

Things done this last week:

Application page

The core of the Applications area in the GNOME website is the content exhibition of each App. To get it right, I worked with custom posts and custom taxonomies in WordPress, and used some other tools to make things work well.

App Screenshots

Screenshots of each application are images uploaded trough the Media panel in WordPress admin, attached to the app page. Each app can have any amount of screenshots and each screenshot can have its own description. If more than three images are provided for an app, a carousel-like navigation will appear on the app page so all the screenshots can be viewed.

App content sections

The app page can contain any kind of content. In fact it works like any other wordpress page. However, there are some predefined styles and titles that optionally can be used to provide consistent information. Right now there are two parts that have an specific style: Highlights and Install. More sections can be added later.

To do so, basically the template looks for <h2> tags and parses as desired. The creation of specific content is as easy as creating the following code (I still need to make some documentation on live.gnome.org explaining all the behaviors of this for content writers):

<h2>Highlights</h2>

    <strong>Customizable Interface</strong>
    Each task requires a different environment and GIMP allows you to customize
    the view and behavior the way you like it.

    <strong>Color correction</strong>
    The included channel mixer gives you the flexibility and power to get your
    B/W photography stand out the way you need. 

<h2>Install</h2>

    <h3>Ubuntu</h3>

        Ubuntu or Debian users can simply run <code>apt-get install gimp</code>
        to get the latest stable release of GIMP.

    <h3>OpenSuse</h3>

        SUSE users can install GIMP by running <code>yast -i gimp</code> or
        <code>zypper in gimp</code>, depending on the distribution version.

    <h3>MacOS X</h3>

        The GIMP team doesn't provide official Mac binaries. You can, however, install
        GIMP 2.6 easily on the Mac using the packages provided by
        <a href="http://gimp.lisanet.de/">GIMP on OS X</a>.

        <a class="download_button" href="http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/Download.html">Download GIMP 2.6</a>

        Running GIMP on Mac OS X requires Apple's X11 environment. It is included on the
        "Optional Installs" package on the OS X install disk.

Which will render like this:

Quick links

Bellow each app we planned to put a list of interesting links. To do such a thing in a nice way, I made a better manager of links inside WordPress admin instead of adding manual custom fields:

Application categories

I used custom taxonomies to provide category support for the apps. Content writers then have full control over it, and the website will display the menus accordingly. The list of apps also gets pagination when necessary.

News Section

Daniel suggested a news section in the app page, that gets a RSS feed from the project website. It can be very interesting for some apps, but I’d like to discuss this with others designers before implementing it. Didn’t have time for that yet.

Community website

After getting the Applications section up, running, working and rocking, I spent just some time up to now on the Community website for GNOME. I studied BuddyPress a little more, specially the theming support.

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For this next week, I’m planning to have something to show regarding BuddyPress theming. See you!