GSoC Weekly Update #9 & 10

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.

Disclosure: my old Dell laptop got the flu a few weeks ago, had some problems to start up, went really bad this weekend and officially died this morning. I’m really in a bad situation right now until I get the new laptop I just bought after this incident (which luckily is going to arrive on Friday 5th at Berlin).

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Getting a custom BuddyPress theme is hard. That’s probably the reason there aren’t many different cool themes laying around. I’ve been spending some real time on this to get a proper theme without ugly hacks and I got some serious cool results. It’s taking much more time than I originally planned, but there are a lot of things done right now.

(unlike the last report, none of the following screenshots are mockups — they’re all working alive things)

I spent the week #9 and part of the week #10 hacking the BuddyPress theme. The members area is completely done. In this part, there is the user profile, user activities, profile edit form, change avatar and settings.

(in the user activities, people can comment on activities done and mark as favorite)

Also, I got the full implementation of geolocation support for users. People can view the position of the user in his/her profile page, and each user can edit it own position in the edit form. The “Location” field is not attached to a specific database nor with the map position, so the user can choose how accurate he’ll be located.

I got as well the layout for the list of members. The first page of this list already contains a map with all the members laying around the globe, which is quite nice (it even considers cache when doing such a hard database request).

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This week #11 is going to be short. I’m without a proper computer to hack and I’ll be from Wednesday 11 AM to Thursday 19 PM between planes and airports in order to get in Berlin (yes, I’m going to Desktop Summit!).

The list of next tasks looks something like the following:

• Layout for Groups and Activities
• Home page with statistics and the interactive map
• Login and Register forms
• Integration with GNOME Services / Blip Monitor

(I’d like to be already working on integrating GNOME services with user activities, but it seems the development of pages are just as important as the integration)

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In the last post Andre and John commented about Shaun‘s Blip Monitor. I didn’t know about it, and I really liked the idea of using it to avoid code rework regarding the integration of user activities with the GNOME services. I got the source code but didn’t have much time to understand it. Hopefully I can talk to some GNOME hackers personally in a few days to discover where to start properly

See you in Berlin!

(no, I didn’t loose any source code of my gsoc because of my laptop death)