GSoC Weekly Update #6 & 7

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.

It’s been long two weeks since my last report. While this does sound like a bad thing, there were two great happenings responsible for it.

1. Went to FISL — I couldn’t miss one of the biggest free software conferences in the world. This year the event had almost 7000 participants, and it was great to meet so many great people at cold Porto Alegre.
2. Final tests of the last semester of University are over — I had plenty of work for most of my classes during the past 3 weeks, and last week in special I had what the university calls “Semester tests”, which was a week with a test each day with all the content of the semester. With all of this done, I’m really happy to say I only need to work on my post-course final paper after September to graduate .

Regarding my GSoC project, yes, I’m a bit late due to those two items. I just didn’t have time to work on it during the Semester tests week, and also didn’t do it at FISL, as opposed to what was planned in my schedule.

Still, I got some things done, as it’s listed bellow:

Polished Applications home page

To finish the Applications section, I added a new meta box in admin to allow website editors to choose which projects will appear in the “Featured” page.

Also, just commited all the code to my github account.

Planned a common layout header for subdomains in GNOME.org

While we already have a new layout for GNOME.org, the subdomains websites shouldn’t have exactly the same header structure. Having the same black bar in all GNOME websites but with completely different items in each one would create lots of confusion for users. Also, the existing header doesn’t look well with logo changes.

To accomplish this, I started working on a common layout header for subdomains in GNOME.org. This task is related with three items of my task: create the Community website, reorganize developer.gnome.org and migrate the subdomains of GNOME to use the new layout.

This is the screenshot of what I got. It’s right implemented in html/css with few resources as possible (it doesn’t require external libraries like grid systems, so it can be reused anywhere):

(the map in the screenshot is a fake demo of Leaflet, a cool map library I’m planning to use)

The idea is to use this layout as base for all subdomains in GNOME websites, as the following examples:

I already started to work in a BuddyPress theme, but as soon as I get the basics I’ll try to focus in implementing the features needed for the Community website, like geolocation of users, apply the user activities on the map and get support to update user activities based on things done inside the project.

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For this week I’m planning to get a working simple version of the BuddyPress theme and start hacking on users geolocation and the home page map.

See you!