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TDF Dashboard: an open window on LibreOffice development

Berlin, August 2nd, 2017 – Effective immediately, The Document Foundation offers a transparent overview of LibreOffice development with the announcement of a Dashboard, available at http://dashboard.documentfoundation.org, which provides a visual representation of the activity on the source code.

LibreOffice Dashboard: activities during the last 30 days

Developed by Bitergia, the Dashboard is based on information retrieved from publicly available data sources, such as Git, Gerrit and Bugzilla repositories, or mailing lists archives. All tools used to retrieve, store, analyse and visualize data from repositories are based on free, open source software. The key component is GrimoireLab, a software development analytics toolset.

“The Dashboard shows the key information about LibreOffice development in several panels, each one including different visualizations, with many actionable elements”, says Bjoern Michaelsen, one of TDF BoD members who has managed the project. “When the user interacts with the actionable elements, the information in the whole panel (or in the whole dashboard) are reconfigured, by filtering in or out some data. Following our transparency guidelines, we are therefore offering an open window on LibreOffice development”.

“Bitergia was founded by a group of Spanish FLOSS enthusiasts, with a large experience in development, research and consultancy”, says company co-founder Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona. “We are very happy to see our software deployed by The Document Foundation for LibreOffice, one of the largest and most successful free software projects”.

Other key software used to produce the Dashboard are Python (to develop most of the retrieval and analytics programs), ElasticSearch (for data storage) and Kibitter, a fork of Kibana contributed back upstream (for data visualization).

Taming the LibreOffice Help System

LibreOffice’s help system needs to evolve and be more effective for users.

LibreOffice’s help system was designed in 2003-2004 and released in 2005. Since then it has not evolved, except for the introduction of an online version hosted in a wiki server (and accessible from LibreOffice when the local help is not installed).

I worked recently to transform our ancient help system into a modern browser-based version. The partial result is available in the (temporary) website at https://helponline.libreoffice.org – please be advised that this is still work in progress.

The XML help pages are transformed into pure, almost static and responsive HTML. This approach has some advantages:

  • Works in every browser
  • Provides the current functionality of the help system
  • Preserves the current development, help authoring, release engineering and translation process as it is
  • You can read the help pages in your mobile phone or tablet
  • It’s easy to add extra markup for better search engine indexing

The disadvantage is an increase in disk storage on the server.

Transforming XML into HTML for every browser

The help pages were designed when the minimal standard HTML was version 3.2 and, since then, many developments have brought us HTML5 in all major browsers. There is little advantage now to keep the current XML, and all of its designed functionality can be replaced and improved by HTML, CSS and JavaScript, for example, adding better navigation and multimedia contents.

The new Help page layout benefits of many modern technologies

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LibreOffice Migration Workshop in Tirana

I have spent the last weekend in Tirana, the capital city of Albania, with a group of young members of the local LibreOffice/FLOSS community – Anxhelo Lushka, Augest Dalliu, Greta Doci, Jona Azizaj, Kristi Progri, Mariana Balla, Marinela Gogo, Redon Skikuli, Sidorela Uku, Silva Arapi and Suela Palushi – for a LibreOffice Migration Workshop.

As everyone can see from the picture, the LibreOffice/FLOSS community in Albania is different from any other open source community, as it has a large majority of women: in fact, the workshop was attended by seven women – Greta, Jona, Kristi, Mariana, Marinela, Sidorela, Silva and Suela (plus another two or three for a few hours) – and three men: Anxhelo, Augest and Redon.

We have planned the workshop at the end of OSCAL, the local FLOSS conference I have attended in mid-May, after a meeting with several representatives of the city of Tirana – organised by Redon Skikuli, and attended by Anxhelo Lushka, Jona Azizaj and me – during which the authorities have expressed their interest in LibreOffice.

During the two days of the workshop, we have covered a large number of topics, from the history of LibreOffice – including development, and activities focused on improving quality and reliability of the software such as Coverity Scan and OSS-Fuzz – to the Migration Protocol and the Training Protocol.

We have gone through every step of the Migration Protocol and we have focused on the different activities included in the analysis, as during the upcoming months the local team will support the city of Tirana for this stage of the project, to help understand the challenges of the migration to LibreOffice.

Last, but not least, I have presented – for the first time – the new slide deck explaining the advantages of ODF vs OOXML to end users, based on the extensive research on the subject I have done during the last six months.

All slide decks will be uploaded to TDF wiki during the next weeks (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Gallery_Presentations).

 

LibreOffice leverages Google’s OSS-Fuzz to improve quality of office suite

Berlin, May 23, 2017 – For the last five months, The Document Foundation has made use of OSS-Fuzz, Google’s effort to make open source software more secure and stable, to further improve the quality and reliability of LibreOffice’s source code. Developers have used the continuous and automated fuzzing process, which often catches issues just hours after they appear in the upstream code repository, to solve bugs – and potential security issues – before the next binary release.

LibreOffice is the first free office suite in the marketplace to leverage Google’s OSS-Fuzz. The service, which is associated with other source code scanning tools such as Coverity, has been integrated into LibreOffice’s security processes – under Red Hat’s leadership – to significantly improve the quality of the source code.

According to Coverity Scan’s last report, LibreOffice has an industry leading defect density of 0.01 per 1,000 lines of code (based on 6,357,292 lines of code analyzed on May 15, 2017). “We have been using OSS-Fuzz, like we use Coverity, to catch bugs – some of which may turn into security issues – before the release. So far, we have been able to solve all of the 33 bugs identified by OSS-Fuzz well in advance over the date of disclosure”, says Red Hat’s Caolán McNamara, a senior developer and the leader of the security team at LibreOffice.

Additional information about Google OSS-Fuzz is available on the project’s homepage on GitHub – https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz – and on Google Open Source Blog: (1) https://opensource.googleblog.com/2016/12/announcing-oss-fuzz-continuous-fuzzing.html (announcement), and (2) https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/05/oss-fuzz-five-months-later-and.html (results after five months).

The Document Foundation announces the MUFFIN, a new tasty user interface concept for LibreOffice

muffinBerlin, December 21, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces the MUFFIN, a new tasty user interface concept for LibreOffice, based on the joint efforts of the development and the design teams, supported by the marketing team. MUFFIN is an acronym for My User Friendly & Flexible INterface, and focuses on the three areas suggested by LibreOffice users during the development of the concept:

  1. My: LibreOffice users want a “personal” UI, with different options capable of adapting to the user’s personal habits, and not a single UI without options.

  2. User Friendly: of course, any UI should be as user friendly as possible, but LibreOffice users have clearly asked for a “modular” UI, where they can set their own level of user friendliness, and not a single UI without options.

  3. Flexible: the increasing number of LibreOffice users deploying the software on different hardware platforms (for instance, a desktop and a laptop), each one with different characteristics and screen size and resolution, have asked for a UI that can be tweaked to leverage the screen real estate, and not a single UI without options.

INterface: The MUFFIN concept is the combination of different UI elements, which are going to be available starting from LibreOffice 5.3 either as a standard or experimental feature: the Default UI (with toolbars), a Single Toolbar UI, the Sidebar with a Single Toolbar, and the new Notebookbar (experimental, and not recommended for production use). Each UI layout has been thought to serve a different cluster of LibreOffice users.

LibreOffice Writer with Standard Toolbar
LibreOffice Writer with Single Toolbar
LibreOffice Writer with Sidebar
LibreOffice Writer with Notebookbar

The rationale behind the MUFFIN is further explained in a marketing backgrounder [PDF] and in a specific blog post on TDF Design Blog.

LibreOffice has a new Extensions & Templates website

Berlin, December 14, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces the new Extensions & Templates website, which offers an improved user experience to both developers and end users: https://extensions.libreoffice.org. The resource is now based on the latest version of the Plone open source Content Management System, and has been both coordinated and developed by Andreas Mantke, deputy member of the board at The Document Foundation.

“Two of LibreOffice’s most distinctive characteristics are the possibility of adding features through extensions, and improving quality and consistency of documents thanks to templates”, says Andreas Mantke. “After six years, we decided to refresh the existing resource, to make it easier for developers to upload their files, and for end users to search and download them. I’d love to see an increasing number of contributors uploading extensions and templates”.

extensionsLibreOffice Extensions & Templates website offers 304 extensions, with 678 different releases, and 339 templates, with 376 releases. The three most popular extensions are: “Clipart gallery of danger signs”, “Copy only visible cells” and “LanguageTool”. The three most popular templates are: “Personal Budget Template”, “Simple FAX Template” and “LibreOffice Presentation Templates”. A large number of available resources have been contributed by end users.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

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