Kaz’hack

Another year, another FOSDEM. This year I haven't been surprised by the overall nerd factor, I guess that's a clear sign that I’ve significantly nerdified myself. Never mind — as Seth B. told me:

It’s okay to be a nerd. Look at Staś!

One Year In Review

I've had the opportunity to give a lightning talk about the work that has been done on KompoZer since the last FOSDEM — i.e. since the first alpha release of the 0.8 branch:

• code cleaning: KompoZer 0.7 was built on Nvu, which required a 15'000 line C++ patch against the Gecko core. Most of this patch concerned UI improvements, which are now implemented in XUL/JavaScript. KompoZer 0.8 builds on an almost pure Gecko core — we just need a little patch for the PHP support.
• new features: the DOM Explorer sidebar and the split view should help KompoZer users learning HTML and CSS, the new Site Manager (still in development) should solve most of the publication issues we inherited from Mozilla Composer.
• team building: KompoZer isn't a one-man-project any more. Cédric Corazza and Frédéric Chateaux have joined the team to help me with the localization support and the quality assurance. Thanks to them I can focus on development.

KompoZer Labs

The best news in these last months is that the KompoZer community is growing. Last year, we've set up a KompoZer labs page with a few projects that we’d like to experiment, and five projects have already been selected by CoMETE students:

• real-time collaborative HTML edition (XMPP/SXE)
• CMS publication (XML-RPC)
• enhanced DOM Explorer sidebar
• easier CSS Editor
• SFTP support

The CoMETE team is very motivated and these projects are making good progress — I'll detail them in another blogpost soon. In case you’re interested in working on another “Labs” project, or if you’d like to submit another idea for this “Labs” page, feel free to ping us on the #kompozer channel.

KompoZer.next

This FOSDEM has also been the opportunity to organize the development of the next KompoZer branch along with the SeaMonkey team. Last year, we’ve had a simple deal:

• the SeaMonkey team would help us build a standalone editor from the comm-central codebase
• in exchange, we’d help backporting KompoZer to SeaMonkey Composer

This deal is now becoming effective, and I already have a pre-alpha, Gecko 1.9.3 build of KompoZer. So instead of just porting KompoZer to Gecko 1.9.3, we’ll open a few tickets on Bugzilla to backport the main KompoZer features and bugfixes on comm-central: putting the code in a public place like BMO and getting reviews from other Mozilla developers should help keeping the project stable and open in the long-term. I’ll do my best to release an official alpha version before the Firefox Summit, with the features that I’ve announced in the EuMozCamp09: Bespin code editor, xml-rpc publication, collaborative edition…

Back To Real Life

I’m almost done with the urgent work, which means I can focus on KompoZer 0.8b2 again. I realize it’s been a while since the last release (0.8b1), so I’ll probably drop some of the unfinished work I’ve been doing on this branch to release the 0.8b2 version ASAP — hopefully next Sunday.