In 2009 I started implementing the website layout. We even had a plan to launch a beta together with GNOME 2.28. But without enough people with knowledge in Plone and lacking time from everywhere to do such a work, we got stuck and never released anything.

During last Guadec I decided to spend some time on it, and after the conference I wrote in my blog about the work I began on implementing the website on top of WordPress. By the time I didn’t know this consideration Federico wrote in 2006, that makes a lot of sense right now:

Lessons from the Past
Our web maintainers become overworked and eventually disappear. The web page becomes stale because then there is no one who understands the previous CMS.
– Federico Mena Quintero

WordPress, being simple to use and being a well known tool for lots of people inside GNOME, was agreed to fully replace Plone after Lincoln and I wrote a plugin to integrate the website content with GNOME translation infrastructure.

(we had tested this WPML plugin (which was open source at the time) before developing our own, but while it offered localization support, it couldn’t integrate the translation system with Damned Lies and all the existing GNOME infrastructure for that)

The plugin basically fetches all the website content in a big XML file, and uses xml2po from gnome-doc-utils to do the magic. Later we get the translated content and put it back with the HTML of the pages.

So, after a while (and a bit more), we are a few days from 3.0 release. And we’ve got a plan to do the switch on April 6^th. The idea is to release the basic website and later add all the planned features. We have the website ready software-wise, and the content and design of pages are getting there (Allan, Andreas and a few others arrived at Bangalore and will try to cover the missing parts of this too).

Stay tuned!

This time GUADEC was located in Den Haag University, and we had a big area for hacking and discussing ideas for GNOME.

Before the talks and keynotes, during the first two days of the conference, I discussed with a lot of people about the state of the gnome.org website. Since the current implementation in Plone was lacking hands to get it done (the start of this work dates from 2007 or so), I suggested instead to do a new approach other than try to keep working in the plone code.

Right on the lobby tables I started then to port the website templates done by me and Andreas to WordPress. Of course you may think that start from scratch the work of a website in another CMS can take even more time, but the difference is that WordPress is widely known and more maintainable (and easier, of course!).

So, basically, to say how WordPress rocks, I got done all the implementation of GNOME website in a couple of days during the conference itself. This means we now have support for static pages, custom template for footers, full localization (by using this great WPML plugin), dynamic banners for the home page and news.

The only possible problem by using WP is that by now it is not possible to integrate it with the infrastructure that GNOME have for translations. Still, if we look the system as a whole, this won’t be a problem since the translation system in WPML works great.

We’re right now putting all the content already made in the wordpress pages. Next step includes polishing the existing content and making it fun to read (other than using long boring paragraphs of text). Oh, and we need to migrate old content as well.

The cool part about all of this is that WP is simple to hack and easy to add new functionalities. A long waited feature we planned to put on the new website is the products page, which will contain a list of featured applications around the GNOME platform with some description. Together with Daniel, we defined a initial set of what to show in these pages. We still need to work on this a bit, but it’s great to see things getting done!

As Ruben said, GUADEC really consisted of truckloads of awesomeness. I must say a big thank you again to the GNOME Foundation (which needs a new website by the way:P) for letting me get there again this year.

The event was together with Latinoware, the (biggest?) Latin American free software conference. Latinoware itself went a bit strange this year. Maybe there was something wrong with organisation, or it was just the rain. The rain was so strong in the last day that almost only half of the participants went to the conference.

For the Fórum GNOME, we got a booth during all the three days and a room for talks during the entire Friday. There were always questions about GNOME 3 by users in the booth, and we spent a great time talking about that and other things with people from all Latin America.

Most of the talks had a focus in the end-user — these were most of the participants in Latinoware. Licio started with his talk explaining how to join GNOME and the GNOME Love Project. Then we got Rodrigo Flores, talking about how to contribute with translation. Alessandro Binhara did a talk about something between Mono, Mono Brasil and Star Wars , which was followed by the GNOME Women talk by Izabel and Luciana. Lastly, I did a talk about user experience in GNOME and Tiago filled the room with his talk about theming and customization.

It was awesome to see many enthusiastic friends from GNOME, Ubuntu-BR, Fedora and KDE. Also, during the conference Everaldo and I discussed a lot about how to clean the user interface of some GNOME applications. We didn’t publish it anywhere yet. But we stopped to think how to do it properly. Like what happened with Hylke’s idea for the font dialog (a designer suggested something and was implemented very quickly by a developer), we agreed it would be nice to have a ArtRequests-like page in the wiki, but for designers asking changes to be made by the developers. We still need to organize a lot of our thoughts however .

I need to say a big thank you to the GNOME Foundation and to all the people who helped the forum happen. Thank you!

Besides the talks and discussions (and the tripping around the island!), most of the time the GNOME Art team spent was in the hacking rooms, working on icon drawings, user interfaces mockups, new ideas for streamlining the desktop and coding the new website layout.

As a work in progress, some changes in the website design appeared while I was putting the new content in the layout (and this still needs to be finished!). The original one Lucas Rocha announced is becoming this (feedback is welcome!):

The plan is to release the beta website together with GNOME 2.28. For this, a lot of work needs to be done, including all the teams — content, design and CMS. We got a bit late in the schedule, but we can still get everything ready in time.

If you want to make history and help the GNOME website development, subscribe the marketing list (for the content and design areas) and the web mailing list for the plone implementation and introduce yourself .

I’ll leave Vitória in about 4 hours (at 3:00 PM) and get to Las Palmas tomorrow morning.

In the Saturday I’ll give a lightning talk called “A new Perspective for GNOME Interface” around 5:00 PM.

See you there!