This is the bi-weekly ownCloud community update for the second half of September. We have brought together activity from development mailing lists, blogs, coding work and everything else community members share with us into an overview for your reading pleasure! Tips are very much welcome. Ping Jos with your input.
Biggest items in the last two weeks of September was the announcement of an alpha of ownCloud Mail 0.1. Aside from the Mail app, there has been activity all over in ownCloud, from small UI fixes to major performance work
You can read a report on the first two weeks of September here.
Development
As always, there was a lot of work in core and various applications like Mail and News.
The development on the Mail app continued, adding a folder view, folder icons, sub folders, showing a highlight when hovering email rows and more, also adding three new maintainers.
Another area of improvement was the user interface. Small user interface issues were taken care off, like making the label next to a radio button in the encryption settings also click-able, showing spinners for more actions showing the system is working, making sure app navigation buttons don’t overlap, transparent images as avatars now work even when you use a gif and crop them and ‘nstamm’ got his first patch merged, fixing a design issue when drag’n’dropping big files on a folder in the web UI. danbartram also had his first patch in when fixing a confusing description of the log_rotate_size configuration value. Many of these small improvements add up to a large difference in user experience!
This is also true for documentation work. For example the ownCloud server upgrade instructions received an overhaul but there is lots more work done in the documentation repository. Get on it if you want to help make the ownCloud documentation better!
Pull Requests Merged in Core and apps
Let’s start with new features, big and small.
- You can now enable and disable previews for different mimetypes
- You can now set a custom ‘skeleton directory’ with example or standard files
- The Activity app now show when a file or folder is restored. Frank also noted that “Sometime the next few month we should introduce a public interface for hooks so that we don’t have to connect to hooks of other apps”. If you’re interested in taking this on – see how to get involved!
- The emails sent by the Activity app now contain relative date and time
- The Deleted Files folder and shares now show their original path information on mouse-over
- And a new ownCloud 7 compatible pong game was merged
- Work has started implementing a common ‘guest screen’ for the various apps that can share data publicly with the creation of a guest layout for different styles
Then there is reliability, performance and security work:
- Several complicated sharing corner cases were dealt with – for example making sure files shared multiple times with an user don’t show up multiple times
- The encryption system creates backups from all keys when the admin uses the password recovery function
- A complicated set of circumstances could lead to a failure of file download with encryption enabled. The fix proved equally hard to device
- A series of improvements referenced in this pull request made it harder for an adversary to bypass network restrictions, making ownCloud safer to use
- The updater will now warn you when updating to a new version is unsupported (like going from 5 to 7)
- A big improvement to the upgrade tool was backported from master to ownCloud 7, making the upgrade process much more reliable
- The post-install WebDAV check was removed in favor of a warning in the admin screen
- In other WebDAV work, it now gives a 403 error instead of falsely claiming a file has been deleted
- file-not-found pages will now be easier to understand as they give more information about what wasn’t found
- The admin page was made a lot faster thanks to the use of a new selection widget, which also made its way to a few other pages
- More performance work was done by voxsim and others on the LDAP backend, turning into an epic journey which ended only days ago and fixed a host of problems!
- A test was created named w͢͢͝h͡o͢͡ ̸͢k̵͟n̴͘ǫw̸̛s͘ ̀́w͘͢ḩ̵a҉̡͢t ̧̕h́o̵r͏̵rors̡ ̶͡͠lį̶e͟͟ ̶͝in͢ ͏t̕h̷̡͟e ͟͟d̛a͜r̕͡k̢̨ ͡h̴e͏a̷̢̡rt́͏ ̴̷͠ò̵̶f̸ u̧͘ní̛͜c͢͏o̷͏d̸͢e̡͝
- The contacts app got a great new ui for importing contacts
- AWS sdk was updated to 2.6.115
- For app developers, the core gained a Android style undo delete, already used in the News app
In client news:
- In the Android libraries, logging was improved
- And the Android app had some UI work done, including immediately showing the contents of an account
- WebDAV can now disclose the size of folders, shown to users in the desktop client
- Work on improving the owncloudcmd tool, part of the desktop client started with this commit and is finished by now
If you want to get involved in coding on ownCloud – check out this page!
Other development updates
On the ownCloud mailing list, ownCloud Mail 0.1 alpha was announced by Thomas and Jan:
- Today we are proud to announce ownCloud Mail 0.1 alpha!
It’s a simple IMAP client with which you can connect to your mail server. Be it on the same server (then it’s superfast) or just your ordinary webmail account. And it integrates nicely with other ownCloud apps.
You can read a little bit of history, a list of current features and the todo list in the announcement mail.
Another notable subject was FOSDEM 2015. There will be a team of ownClouders there and we’re looking for people to help out with the booth and talks!
You can join or just follow the development discussions on mailman.
Other ownCloud happenings
There was plenty of Planet ownCloud activity.
- There was a big article on the major update to the News app
- There was a blog about saving face and why privacy is important, followed up by a post about how old and invalid excuses keep being dragged into this debate.
- A tutorial for installing the ownCloud client on openSUSE was shared
- The ownCloud company organized a webinar on the difference between the community and enterprise edition, which you can watch in the webinar archive
- Raghu blogged about 5 things every designer should know
In social media, we read that pretty much all #ownCloudconf videos are available now and ownCloud Inc shared that ownCloud made it to the front page of c’t, one of the most subscribed computer magazines in Europe!
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.
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 on owncloud.org/events.
ownCloud meetups are a chance to learn more about ownCloud or even 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.
