Note: We are not talking about “official releases” yet, but about ongoing efforts and the results of our development sprints. Just sit back and enjoy 🙂
Bridging two Worlds
ownCloud Infinite Scale and most of the building blocks around it are evolving as we speak. Getting interested users in touch with the cool new stuff as early possible is one of the biggest opportunities and challenges to attracting people to a new platform. The easiest way to do this is to just set up the fresh system and play around with it. Since most people in our ecosystem already have an ownCloud instance based on the ownCloud 10 codebase up and running, they can skip the green field experimentation – which is still possible of course – and use our bridge mode, which is way cooler. It allows adventurous users to try out the emerging parts of ownCloud Infinite Scale and ownCloud Web concurrently to their existing ownCloud to get a real-life experience.
Recently, we made a lot of progress in the building blocks needed to create this setup. Here is the documentation.
Docker Compose
To bring all pieces together that are needed to bring up ownCloud 10 and ownCloud Infinite Scale together with SSL certification traefik as a proxy, the ownCloud developers have prepared a docker compose file that contains everything to get you going.
OpenID Connect
ownCloud Infinite Scale uses openID Connect for user authentication. To have that available for ownCloud 10 as well, we recently released the openID Connect App. Find it on the ownCloud Marketplace and on GitHub.
The Desktop Client
Introducing OpenID Connect also requires the ownCloud Desktop clients for Windows, Mac and Linux to implement some changes to enable, utilize and reflect the new, modern authentication. The ownCloud Desktop client version 2.7.1 containing these changes was just released. In addition to the existing basic auth based authentication it brings all that’s necessary for OIDC. Check out the release blog post.
ownCloud Web
Beside the bridge setup between the old and new world, our current focus is to make ownCloud Web just awesome. It is the new web client for the ownCloud Infinite Scale platform. For example, in the current sprint, the integration of actions in the GUI is being reworked. Actions now appear consistently in a sidebar, correctly showing the available actions in the context of the selected item. Whether a user selects a simple file, a file that can be edited or viewed in the web UI or a directory, the suitable actions appear in the same place. This makes ownCloud Web a clear and simple tool to increase productivity.
ownCloud Design System
To make ownCloud Web look nice and consistent, we added new web UI elements for sharing files to the ownCloud Design System. Check the design system page to see how awesome it already is.
ownCloud Infinite Scale Extensions
One of the main motivations for the ownCloud Design System is to ease the creation of ownCloud Infinite Scale extensions. Through extensions, the ownCloud Infinite Scale platform can be supplemented with all kinds of web-based applications that make use of the data stored in ownCloud. Ideally, creating extensions should be very easy and fast. To help with that, we created a templating system based on boilr which makes it very easy to kickstart an extension. Already awesome, we will improved it in an internal hands-on session soon. Stay tuned for more 🙂
