Collabora Online Community Roundup #7

On October 1st, Collabora Online moved to its new home on GitHub, and started settling in the new infrastructure, expanding its fantastic community, and continuing the work to deliver the latest and greatest developments in productivity and collaboration together. Check our new community website for all the details! ;)

Collabora developers also keep fixing and improving our lovely mother project LibreOffice. As all the good work requires some appreciation, let’s take a look at what the seasoned developers of the Collabora team and the volunteer contributors from our community have been doing during the last week.

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 29 authors have pushed 102 commits to master and 193 commits to all branches. On master, 150 files have changed and there have been 2,357 additions and 1,480 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 13, 2020 to November 20, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to SaschaT667, JensTheCoder, BernhardGehl, accolon and Gabriel Filion for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to SaschaT667 for opening an enhancement request for adding editable and dynamically-calculated formulas support to Writer documents.
• Thanks to JensTheCoder for reporting an issue about frozen lines in Calc documents.
• Thanks to BernhardGehl for letting us know about some unexpected log messages from COOL, integrated with Nextcloud.
• Thanks to accolon for reporting an issue about zoom factors of spreadsheets on macOS Big Sur.
• Thanks to Gabriel Filion for reporting a bug which caused COOL packages for some distros to fail to start, and thanks to Andras Timar for fixing it quickly.

Thank you all, and welcome aboard! :)

Join the fun!

You can also join the fun, and be part of our next list of new contributors! :)

Just go to our GitHub repo, fork it, build it (on Linux or on any platform), grab one of our newcomer-friendly easy hacks, and send your first pull request. And if you get stuck at any point, just drop by one of our communication channels. ;)

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #3

COOL Weekly Meeting #3 has taken place on Thursday, November 26, 2020 at 11:00:00 am (UTC) with participants both from the community contributors and the Collabora team. We have got a quick update on what’s going on and discussed matters raised by the contributors, as well as having the chance to say hi to fellow members of the community. Topics discussed in the meeting include:

• Contextual toolbars for COOL (suggested by Andreas Kainz) got a new patch merged to master with some initial bits of implementation. Andreas Kainz will test it and give feedback.
• Icon theming for COOL leveraging SVG files (suggested by Andreas Kainz) has been decided to be turned into an issue on GitHub to keep track of the initial work of defining the class names. Below is a proof of concept screenshot by Andreas Kainz demonstrating how two different sets of icons can be obtained just by using two different SVG classes.

A proof of concept screenshot by Andreas Kainz demonstrating two different sets of icons with two different SVG classes

• The blog post about iOS app upgrade (suggested by Nicolas Christener) is planned to be written/published when the new upgrade is out. It was also mentioned that new beta testers should ask Kendy for access to the testing versions.
• Regarding Mobile / iOS versions, Pedro Silva has reported that the Notebookbar for iPad has been improved, and many fixes and improvements have already been included in 6.4 for a more clutter-free notebookbar with better user experience for iOS users. He has also touched up the community website to add a prominent link to the forum.
• Gökay Şatır has shared some update about his work on CanvasTileLayer
• Gabriel Masei asked about the ways to avoid duplicated effort, and was suggested to keep in touch with the team in the #cool-dev channel on Freenode, and also participate in the following sessions of the COOL Weekly Meeting. He is interested in contributing to COOL to make it possible to dynamically change between the classic toolbar and the new notebookbar views.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, December 03, 2020, at 11:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. ;)

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities for certain integrations, thus helping COOL have an even better automated quality assurance process, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes[0][1] on the notebookbar such as making sure the sidebar tooltips have correct positioning.
• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements towards increasing general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors.
• Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Remove border cell, Right border cell, Left border cell, Left and Right border, Top border, Bottom border, Apply top and bottom border and Apply border for all sides, Apply horizontal borders, Apply all inner and outer borders, and More option in border style.
• Thanks to Thaís Vieira for adding cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items of Impress, such as Italic, Underline, and Strikethrough.
• Thanks to Gleb Popov for continuing his work on bringing Collabora Online to FreeBSD, with many commits.
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and consistent look and feel across different platforms. He has also improved the UX of COOL a bit more by making sure it is now easier to differentiate between insert and overwrite mode in the status bar.
• Thanks to Aron Budea for improving support for Debian GNU/Linux.
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for making sure status of automatic spell checking feature is properly remembered on first start, and many other fixes and improvements especially around the Android app and the support for Chromebooks.

Collabora Online on Chromebook

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing an issue which caused the on-screen keyboard not coming back after being dismissed once in a session in the iOS app. He has also made sure that no auto-scrolling of a page on a Writer document happens if user is making a selection by dragging the selection handles in the iOS app.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for making sure that plain text content copied from browser is properly pasted without additional characters in the Android app.

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Roeland Jago Douma for improving performance of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making sure extra queries and steps are avoided by obtaining the appdata folder in one go. He has also improved handling of empty files to avoid possible issues.
• Thanks to Julius Härtl and Andras Timar for reviewing and merging pull requests on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
• Thanks to Phil Davis for upgrading phan version on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, thus helping to maintain a high PHP code-quality for the project.
• Thanks to Semih Serhat Karakaya for making Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration future-proof by changing the code to use the path from the appManager instead of a static one.
• Thanks to Jan Ackermann for helping Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration stay up-to-date by replacing some deprecated functions with current ones, as well as making sure the integration app has the correct default name.

Honorable Mentions

• Thanks to Marc Rodrigues for continuing to keep us updated on various news around Collabora Online and related FOSS projects, and creating a lot of yummy content to read!
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• Thanks to Cor Nouws for leading the marketing team, and not stopping there but continuing with testing & reporting bugs, attending to community events, and keeping us all informed about what’s going on. He also attends LibreOffice Design meetings from time to time to help COOL’s mother project LibreOffice have a better UI & UX.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for doing a lot of research on different topics, and providing mentoring/patch-reviewing/hand-holding/wisdom within the team, in our communication channels, and also on various channels of our lovely mother project LibreOffice.
• Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
• Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presence bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

Last but not least, we can’t thank enough to our translators who constantly help COOL and its friends talk many languages on this earth. Collabora Online speaks many languages, thanks to all of our translators in our translation project, and all of those who previously contributed and keeps contributing to our mother project, LibreOffice.

We’re continuing to work to find good ways to credit translators’ hard work in the product. Please see a list of those involved, and please get in touch if you’re not listed. Many thanks to all those who have worked on translating Online, you rock!

If you would like to help COOL speak your language, you can just go to our translation project on weblate, and start contributing! ;)

Collabora Online translation project on Weblate

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

We’re still contributing to LibreOffice and encourage you too to do so because LibreOffice rocks. ;)

• Thanks to Gülşah Köse for making sure documents with text camera z rotation are properly opened and saved for PPTX files, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for fixing a bug that caused LibreOffice to not update all preview images on an ODT file after issuing the UpdateAll command, as well as various other fixes for issues encountered while opening certain DOCX files,[0][1] and also for improving PPT support by resolving an issue which caused some images being lost after opening a PPTX file and saving it as PPT.
• Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.