This is the bi-weekly ownCloud community update for week 40-42, from October 1st to 19. We put this together from activities on github, the mailing lists, blogs and whatever else is shared in the ownCloud community. Tips are welcome, ping Jos with your input!
Biggest items last week were the work in and around app management, the integration of tag sharing in the ownCloud core, improvements in the Chat app and the Android app, performance improvements all over ownCloud and better documentation.
You can read a report on the last two weeks of September here.
Development
Let’s kick off with development news. After having gone through no less than 6 iterations, tag sharing marked the latest contribution by ockham, implementing the result of a design discussion a year ago. A second big piece of work merged is the major overhaul of the app manager, getting rid of all the apps in the sidebar and improving the work flow when dealing with adding, enabling and disabling apps.
This pull request was followed with more work on the updating and installation process including better handling of third party apps, catching more errors gracefully, being smarter about app versioning and preventing updates between major versions.
In the Documentation area, the encryption sections in the user manual and the admin manual got rewritten; adding a note about no expiration date on local shares, custom certificates are now mentioned, the user quota section was rewritten, file notifications are now covered, there was work on the filesharing section and much more, even prompting improvements to the ownCloud default configuration.
Design, sharing and performance
Many small design improvements help make ownCloud look and feel better:
- making the Updater match the ownCloud style
- the improved page size calculation by nazar-pc
- making previews work in the versions folder
- a fix for the position and style of the sort indicator
- fixing the position of the rename field
- increasing whitespace below headings in settings
- adding some visual improvements and
- making the radio button labels click-able in the encryption app
Sharing improvements like introducing case-insensitive search for groups in the sharing dialog, adding a 750ms delay to the sharing menu, much faster sharing in the presence of large numbers of files and much improved handling of group shares all lead to a smoother ownCloud sharing experience.
There also has been quite a bit of performance work. By using cssmin and jsmin, the ownCloud source is smaller and loads faster. Memory usage of the file scanner was decreased, work was done on using cached data to speed up dealing with permissions, a PR was merged decreasing the impact on responsiveness of preview generation and more.
And much more
improved zoom in Documents
- In LDAP news, retrieval of group members was improved by caching the results, a massive speed improvement for nested LDAP groups by macjohnny was finally merged as well as some protocol handling changes improving robustness with large number of users
- A conversation about a new Chat API resulted in the ability for developers to write their own chat backend for the chat app. Also new in the chat app is support for file attachments
- A stinky code removal in the Documents app is merely the last in a list of improvements during the period we cover, including improved zoom, a fix to sharing, a big, red connection lost warning and several other fixes
- In the Android app you can now choose a different instant upload path thanks to a contribution by loripino21 and tobiasKaminsky and others kicked forward work on thumbnails for downloaded images
- Work on better dealing with self signed certificates has started
- oparoz contributed support for a much wider variety of file types, including Illustrator and Photoshop files, to ownCloud core
- Work in ownCloud Mail continued, with small UI text consistency fixes and more from zinks, fixes to utf-8 support (deepdiver1975) and more
- When an error is unavoidable, this pull request was merged which gives a proper error page with problem description
new connection lost bar in Documents
If you want to get involved in coding on ownCloud – check out this page!
Third party ownCloud apps
On apps.owncloud.com: was lots of activity again.
- Brand new is the Password Policy Enforcement app, doing exactly what the name suggests
- The ownCloud Subsonic music player Subphonic was updated with a fix for notifications
- ownCloud Password manager app Passman had some updates and bugfixes
- The Popup app simply shows a message whenever the user navigates to the files app. It introduces some additional configuration options in version 0.4
- Storage Charts 2 received a minor update
- The file locking app Working2gether updated with Japanese support
- The files move app got some small bug fixes
- The newcomer webmail client AfterLogic WebMail Lite had some bugfixes and a documentation update
Other development updates
The ownCloud development list was busy as always. Notable was the question by Christian Weiske about the app review process (which can use documentation! Anybody up for it?), conversations about beta releases and other testing and a conversation about serving minified js/css.
You can join the discussions on this page.
Other ownCloud happenings
There was quite a bit of activity on Planet ownCloud. The highlights:
- A blog post about ownCloud community statistics introduced Bitergia, a tool displaying development graphs
- The ownCloud Inc blog carried a post on ‘warning signs’ after another weekend with news of many hacks and break-ins in public clouds
- The development update on the last weeks of September made it to planet ownCloud
- the ownCloud blog notified of an upcoming ownCloud talk in Beijing
- Ilias published a blog about the installation of the ownCloud client on openSUSE
- Jos Poortvliet wrote about the importance of privacy
- and the ownCloud blog updated us on the upcoming major update of the news app
Please note that if you’re an ownCloud contributor, you should get your blog aggregated on owncloud.org/news! Ping Jos with your RSS feed.
the ownClouders twitter account shared an interesting video on installing Owncloud in a FreeNAS jail using lighttpd:
Our very own @janborchardt shared some great advice for open source designers at the Bono14 conference.
We linked to a great blog about ownCloud in a student organization, the loads and loads of pull requests which need your help in reviewing and more.
Events!
There are ownCloud events taking place! You can meet fellow ownCloud users and developers at ownCloud meetups or see us at conferences. Find a calendar of ownCloud events on owncloud.org/events. We are looking for volunteers to help out organizing ownCloud attendance at the SCALE event in California and the FOSDEM event in Belgium, both February next year. Join the ownCloud events mailing list if you want to help!
ownCloud meetups are a chance to learn more about ownCloud or to get coding work done. If you know of other (regular or not) meetups or are interested in organizing one yourself, check out this page on how to get involved.
