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This year I went to Würzburg, which is a nice small German city famous for its wine. But I didn’t only go there for the wine, but also to attend Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy.

Qt Contributor Summit

The travel to Würzburg didn’t go as planned as Deutsch Bahn had some technical issues with their train and couldn’t reboot our train. We still managed to get in Würzburg on time and even had the change to get a small touristic tour from some locals.

Würzburg Residence and the Wine briget

The event itself was great and was the first time I attended fully a Qt Contributor Summit. Last year, I only attended a few session since the event was 20 min away from home.

There was many breakout rooms focused on some spcial topics, for me the most interesting sessions were about Qt for Python, how to hate QML, qt-project.org, Vector Graphics in Qt.

It was great to see how the KDE community still plays a big role in Qt and the Qt developers really appreciated what KDE finally moved to Qt6. They reported that the flow of contributors and bug reports increased.

Qt Chief Maintainer Volker Hilsheimer even stressed out how important it was for some of their customers to see KDE ported to Qt6, as it shows what Qt6 is stable and mature enough. Qt6 is indeed a hugo improvement over Qt5 and I am very happy how good the transition was.

Qt Contributor Summit

I think it was a great idea to have Qt Contributor Summit just before Akademy. This allowed to have many KDE Contributor to the Qt Contributor Summit and many Qt developers to Akademy. It would be great next year to do the same next if possible and encourage more people from the Open Source Qt ecosystem to join too.

Akademy

Once the Qt Contributor Summit ended, we started a few hours later with the Akademy welcome event for some KDE beers. But before that, I had some bubble tea and spent some time with some friends exploring the city.

The weekend was full with a lot of great presentations. I presented a small report about the Accessibility Goal and the Fundraising working group. I also gave a bigger talk about the KDE Application Ecosystem, which I am really passionate about. The whole slides ware made with Calligra.

I was also very happy to see the new elected goals.

Sunday was also my birthday, thanks to everyone for congratulating me. I also received a super fancy special birthday sticker and some amazing cake.

Cake and stickers

Day Trip

We had our yearly day trip too, this time at Rothenburg ob der Tauber. A charming small town in south Germany.

Day trip Rothenburg ob der Tauber

BoFs

The next few days were filled with BoFs and many informal discussions. During the Promo BoF, we decided to create a “This Week in KDE Apps” blog posts. Paul volunteered Tobias, Joshua, and me as the initial team for this.

I also hosted a BoF about a future replacement of KWallet. There were some discussions about the scope of this effort. Should we just focus on storing OAuth2 tokens as a background service what the normal users should never interact with or do a full-blow password manager like macOS Keychain. I presented my work toward the latter around based on KeePassXC and the KeePass format (see my old blogpost) as it would allow to use a standardized file format that also work on other platforms. The KeePassXC developers are working on providing a reusable library, so we don’t need to fork their code. There will likely be more discussion about this in a separate gitlab issue. The lack of a good story around passwords is not unique to KDE but to the whole Linux ecosystem. If you have some opinions about this, feel free to reach out.

I discussed with Ben, Lydia and Aniqua the infrastructure for newsletters for our supporting members. Ben managed to get an instance of Listmonk in a matter of minutes and this seems to be the right way for us to manage a newsletters or at least way better than using a mailing list for this.

Kieryn hosted the best BoF: the Sticker BoF where we shared stickers and had a competition to see who had the best decorated laptop. I won!!! and received another special sticker. Thanks Kieryn for organizing this BoF and generally making Akademy this year such an awesome event!

Stickers

I also ended up finishing a lot of work. I finally ported the last Drupal 7 website to Hugo: dot.kde.org which was a quite massive website with more than 20 years of history. I migrated the Hugo version used by KDE from 0.110.0 (which was more than a year old) to 0.134.0 and I am happy to report that the Hugo folks care a lot about stability and there was only some very small breaking changes. If you are working on some KDE websites, don’t forget to download the latest version of Hugo and to run the following command to update the KDE Hugo theme.

hugo mod get invent.kde.org/websites/hugo-kde@master

With Volker, we finally merged the status bar integration for Android apps so that KDE apps running on Android and now use breeze colors in their status bar, which looks much more integrated and like on Plasma Mobile.

Itinerary on Android with the new statubar

I also got some improvements ideas during Akademy, and I already started implementing some of them: https://invent.kde.org/pim/itinerary/-/merge_requests/324

Finally I started rewritting the Calligra launcher to Kirigami based on the old Gemini UI. Still a bit far away from a being in a mergable state but it already looks quite good.

Calligra text document templates selection

Calligra new document

Conclusion

This was a great Akademy again. Thanks a lot for all the organizers for all their work. I hope to see some KDE contributors again soon at the Nextcloud Conference and Matrix Summit both in Berlin this month. And to the Linux Days in Dornbirn.

Calamares is a Linux system installer used by dozens of distro’s to get the bits from an ISO image onto a target computer. Development is nowadays purely on a volunteer basis, which makes it hard to keep up with all the changes in the Linux world. But steps are made, and code submissions are very welcome, and here’s a note on something relatively new and useful: Wayland keyboard layouts.

Some History

In an X11-based system, the X server is the one thing that knows how to interpret keystrokes (pressing the button on a bit of hardware, e.g. the button to the right of the one labeled CapsLock is labeled A and makes the letter “a” when pressed). The X server can be told how to interpret the buttons: one command is setxkbmap which can manipulate the keymap:

$ setxkbmap -query rules: evdev model: pc105 layout: us options: ctrl:swapcaps

Using setxkbmap you can change the layout from the command-line: setxkbmap -layout us changes it to US-English, setxkbmap -layout ua changes it to Ukranian, and there’s tons of other layouts.

In Ukranian, pressing the keys labeled WASD yields “ЦФІВ”.

Changing the keyboard layout is just a matter of being connected to the X server – any X11 terminal program can do it, or an application can do it programmatically by sending the right X11 protocol messages.

Wayland

There isn’t a standardized mechanism in Wayland to request a different keyboard layout. It’s up to the compositor how and what it wants to do.

Some compositors are willing to listen to systemd’s locale1 service. KWin does this, but only when started with suitable command-line flags. Many systems that start KWin as part of their live installation do not pass that flag. Some compositors just don’t implement this at all.

KWin (Wayland)

The way to tell KWin to change the keyboard layout is to rewrite the configuration file for keyboard layouts in KDE Plasma, then send a DBus signal to KWin.

You can see that happening here, at least as of the code in April 2024. I suppose the idea is that the only way to change the keyboard layout is to go through the KCM, click on the list of layouts, manipulate it, etc. and then click apply.

For those cases when I briefly want to type Ukranian, or Arabic, that’s really annoying. For Calamares, which tries to set the keyboard layout when you select one, that’s really annoying.

Calamares and KWin

In the upcoming Calamares 3.3.10 release, the installer can be configured to edit KDE Plasma’s keyboard configuration file. I imitated the code from the KCM, but without relying on KConfig because that would be yet-another dependency for Calamares. This is a total bodge job. But it works!

For distro’s that use Calamares, and use KDE Plasma, and come up with a live system that uses Wayland (e.g. Asahi Linux) this means that keyboard layout updates can now be applied consistently, and you can e.g. type your password in the keyboard layout you’re actually going to use.

It ain’t pretty. Frankly, I think there should be a standardized way to say “use these keyboard layouts”, but I also understand that that opens the whole can of worms of “who should be allowed to change the keyboard layout?”.

If you're using Plasma/KWin 6 i suggest you disable the Morphing Popups effect, it has been removed for Plasma 6.2 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/commit/d6360cc4ce4e0d85862a4bb077b8b3dc55cd74a7 and on X11 at least it causes severe redraw issues with tooltips in Okular (and i would guess elsewhere).

This year’s Akademy (KDE’s annual conference) in Wurzburg, Germany was a success!

Yours truly had a chance to speak during the Akademy days and present our new design system to the community.

As previously reported in my youtube channel and in my posts, we provided a set of design system foundations to the community for their use in the future. This means, designers and developers will more closely work in the design process.

A few new faces also appeared at the venue. This was amazing! New contributors excited about our technologies is always welcomed.

In addition to the main session, our Visual Design Team put together an additional Birds of a Feather (BoF) session the following day. I have to say that I have never seen this many people interested in our presentation before and I am greatly appreciative of their desire to help.

We split our BoF in 3 sessions. The main session was an exploration of our export plugin for Figma and PenPot (Authored by Manuel de la Fuente), and also a review of the actions the VDG (Visual Design Group) needs to take to publish the work in the design system.

Our second hour was dedicated to reviewing our visual changes acceptance guidelines (led by Nate Graham). This session was intended to speed up the rate of response for visual design changes in Plasma and other areas. This should help us go faster and be more effective in our decision-making process.

The work is tracked here:
https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/wikis/home

Our third hour was dedicated to Arjen Hiemstra’s new unified theme builder “Union”. Arjen showed us the source code and current capabilities of Union. It’s still early days but the progress is huge. There are a few new features that Arjen wants to add to the engine and we should see more of them in the near future.

Throughout the week, we dedicated time to testing and bettering the icons we produced. Our next objective is to address the latest round of feedback and then begin the process of editing our 16px icons to match our shapes in the 24px collection. Additional to that, we still need to find as many bugs as possible with the new icons.

During one of our sessions we noticed that some icons did not work properly in dark mode. This was a good test to do as some of the shapes didn’t recolor properly. Good thing that we were surrounded by Plasma devs and it was easy to spot the problem! This, however, does not mean the icons are free of issues. They still need a lot of work.

For now, I would like to invite all those who would like to provide feedback and/or test the icons. Please note that this is as alpha as it gets. There is a lot more to be done. Until all icons are finished, you can test the 24px collection.

Plasma Icons 24px collection:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oayQeHloyYJwL3WpjgoAQjR-Mnt-H8k/view?usp=drive_link

Figma link for icon feedback:

https://www.figma.com/design/F38rWWFmFRcyolDk07xxKw/Icons?node-id=0-1&node-type=canvas&t=FiBCevySX0c6XmBE-0

Soon enough, I will also edit a few of the images I took from the city and during Akademy. Needless to say, this one was by me!

Aren’t we cool?

See you all soon!

Part of the Kdenlive team attended this year’s Akademy – KDE’s annual conference in Würzburg, Germany. Since we don’t have so many occasions to meet in real life, we also used the event to make a Kdenlive team sprint.

So here is a report of what happened during these busy 4 days !

Documentation

We first discussed how to better integrate our great documentation inside the Kdenlive app. We already have a kind of hidden link in the effect list that redirects the user to the documentation website, but decided to make the feature more visible and you will now (to be released in 24.12.0) find a small info button redirecting to our doc. In the process, we fixed and improved many links so that you now directly access the correct page.

https://kdenlive.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/online-documentation.webm

Roadmap

We discussed our roadmap, moved the tasks that were completed in a dedicated column. We also reviewed the remaining tasks and reorganized them to better align with our priorities.

Fundraising

We reviewed the tasks planned in our fundraising, what has been done and what is left, more on this will be announced in an upcoming post soon.

Kdenlive Café

We decided to go for one online user Café every 2 months.This is a great way to stay in touch with the community, and we plan to have themes for these events, for example creating content with Kdenlive, Development news and coding introduction, How to contribute (documentation, testing, etc). Next one will be in November, focused on the next December release. Stay tuned for the date.

Render Test Suite

Last year, we worked on a rendering test suite that is aimed at automating rendering and comparing the result with a reference video file. The goal being to detect and prevent regressions in our pipeline. Unfortunately, since it still requires a local install and manual triggering, we are not really making use of it. During the sprint, we worked on making it run on our current CI infrastructure for full automation. Some good progress was made, there are still a few things to debug.

Website

We discussed possible changes regarding our website, more to be announced later this year.

LV2 Audio Effects

With the recent introduction of an LV2 module in our video backend MLT, we made tests with some LV2 audio effects. Some effects that don’t require a specific UI work but session state (saving and restoring the effect data, for example with the noise repellent plugin) is not yet implemented in the MLT module, so its usability is currently very limited.

AI Effects

We discussed and tested a few models providing AI effects. Some work has to be done to make the way we integrate python scripts more modular, we will soon start working on this.

Bugs

We didn’t have enough time unfortunately to do much work on the bugtracker but still managed to tackle a few issues. Among them, we found the reason for missing notifications on Windows, found 2 regressions in our video backend causing affecting playback smoothness, and various smaller bugs.

Akademy

Between our Sprint sessions, we also attended several of the Akademy talks, and met great people there. Julius made a talk about his work on the CI regarding packaging and notarization. Some of us also attended a translation workshop so that we can better guide interested contributors.

 

Busy week-end, and you will hear again from us soon!

The post Akademy and Kdenlive Sprint report appeared first on Kdenlive.

Akademy 2024 in Würzburg – it was a blast

My second Akademy and has ended just yesterday. It was an amazing and productive time again! Apart from familiar faces I know from last year's Akademy or the Plasma sprint last year in Augsburg, I met plenty of new faces. Some of which I of course had contact in KDE before, but only in the digital world.

One of the best parts was again the day trip with the KDE Community. While it was a bit rainy, we for sure made the best of it and saw the beautiful city of “Rothenburg ob der Tauber”. The view from the town hall tower was very beautiful:

The talks were also quite interesting and highlighted how many facades the KDE Community has. Apart from the lightning talks being great again, the “QML in Qt6” talk was quite valuable, because I did not manage to follow up closely on the latest improvements.
The talks and BOFs related to the KDE goals were also quite beneficial in getting a good impression in what direction we want to go.

Since we had so many interesting talks, it was not possible to join all of them. What I will follow up on later are the talks “Pythonizing Qt” and “C++, Rust and Qt: Easier than you think”.

Albert Astals Cid and I gave a lightning talk together about JSON linting (my part) and QML linting (his part). We were only able to touch the surface in the given time, but had some productive discussions and follow-up questions afterward. I will create a post about the JSON validation/JSON schema topic in the future, since I am still working on some aspects of this.

It has been great again to also do some hacking together and discuss ideas in-person. I will miss being able to say “Let's discuss this at Akademy?” on merge requests ;).
I did quite a bit of hacking on KRunner, linting/formatting related tooling and also Clazy.
This can also be seen on my GitLab history that has turned a bit more blue and thus active:

What was a great improvement over the last Akademy were the chicken noises to make sure people stay within the time of their talk! To better improve on that, we should maybe get some real chicken next year 🥚🐣🐔. The talks on how to apply for funding in KDE might contain useful info when working towards this ;) PS: My life-long profile picture on GitHub/GitLab is of the super cute chicken I had 🥰.

“Heather, Heather, Heather; what did you do now!” and both me & Fenris started laughing with Till, as we’re discussing about the thunderbird snap during the conference dinner.

Yup, this is from UbuCon Asia, my

• First conference
• First flight journey
• First travel out of my state
• First solo travel out of my state
• First solo stay at a hotel

Huhhh, a lot of first timers! I can’t think actually where to start with… I met so many people out there, got so many mentors! Thanks Till , for introducing me with so many mentors! I met Guruprasad sir (the launchpad guru 😄), Kierthana mam and Dimple didi (both are the documentation gurus). A lot of suggestions, tips, guides from them! Thanks a lot 🥹! BTW, How can I forget my OG Bhavani bhaiyaa!

Discover how DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 is prioritizing sustainability with eco-friendly initiatives and practices. From reducing food waste to promoting mental well-being, attendees are encouraged to participate in creating a more environmentally conscious event. Join the movement towards a greener future at DrupalCon Barcelona.

How do you take advantage of Git pre-commit hooks? How do you build custom software checks and rules that run every time you commit your code? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder's Weekly articles and projects.

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

Akademy 2024 is a wrap, and others have already begun to write about the conference in beautiful Würzburg, Germany, with some posts already visible on https://planet.kde.org. This year’s Akademy was fantastic, probably the best one I’ve ever attended. Other than the A/V situation (which we’ll be addressing next year, pinkie-promise), it was well-organized and smoothly run.

But more substantively, the talks and sessions were incredible, and really wove together a coherent narrative: KDE has mature and effective leaders who are pushing forward strategic projects that combine to become more than the sum of their parts. Among them:

Design

Andy Betts introduced us to the concept of the design system and how he and other VDG designers are building one to help unify layout and style across KDE software. …then Arjen Hiemstra introduced us to Union, a new styling system intended to be a single tool to style everything, and it can be informed by the design system’s semantics as well.

Apps

Nicolas Fella explained how our app development platform is lacking, inhibiting the growth of a more vibrant KDE-centric app ecosystem. This is also the topic of one of KDE’s newest high-level goals (full disclosure: I’m a co-champion of this goal along with Nicolas as primary champion). Carl Schwan laid out his “App Initiative” which is directly related, and David Edmundson talked about how we can improve the ability of our software to work in sandboxed environments.

Distribution

Harald Sitter introduced us to “KDE Linux” (tentative name), a new technologically advanced OS that will offer a radically high level of stability, security, and polish for those wishing to get KDE software directly from the source. David Edmundson’s talk about sandboxing is also heavily related here as well.

Recruitment

But how are we going to do all of this? Paul Brown, Aniqa Khokhar, and Johnny Jazeix introduced us to the “KDE Needs You ” goal, aiming to reach more people to broaden the pool of potential contributors so KDE is sustainable for years to come.

Eco

And finally, some perspective on a different sustainability issue: this was the hottest year on record, breaking records set just a few years prior. Our planet’s capacity to sustain human life in certain regions is starting to be impacted, and we need to consider both how our work exacerbates it, and how we can do our part to help make it better. Accordingly, we heard from Joanna Murzyn, Cornelius Schumacher, and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss about KDE’s efforts to prolong the lifespan of old hardware so it doesn’t become e-waste. And Nicole Teale gave us some concrete hope by informing us about a program to introduce German schoolkids to the idea of upcycling old computers by installing Kubuntu on them, very similar to a similar program here in the USA that I was tangentially involved with!

Hopefully the themes and synergies here are clear. KDE is becoming more professional, more comprehensive in scope, will take more initiative for the distribution of its own software, will evolve that software’s design in a way that’s supported by modern design tools and professional designers, and contributes to solving the world’s biggest problems. I find this to be super exciting, and I hope you do too!

My personal role in Akademy was a bit more behind-the-scenes this year. I did take part in two presentations: the former goal wrap-up and the KDE e.V. Board of Directors report.

In these, I described the successes and challenges of my now-concluded Automation & Systematization goal, and helped to inform the community about KDE e.V.’s activities since last Akademy.

I also participated in Many birds-of-a-feather (BoF) sessions about various topics, including:

• A tech discussion about KDE Linux — install it today and help make it great!
• Plasma planning and roadmap — Plasma is in a great state, and we’re going to resume Monday meetings, this time in video form. I’ve got five specific features, UI changes, or bug-fixes I want to add to 6.3, and others have even more ideas.
• Design team decision-making process — super useful; we came up with one to enable us to make important decisions again.

Beyond the BoFs, I found myself constantly talking to people between sessions, during lunch, and in what seemed like every spare moment! Including:

• Björn Balazs about his work to create https://privact.org, a foundation building a next-generation method to gather metrics from users with zero risk to their privacy.
• Jos van den Oever about KDE developers applying for sponsorship from https://nlnet.nl to work on important KDE and KDE-relevent projects. Seriously, go do it!
• Eike Hein about KDE’s history and the 100% drama-free Trinity Desktop Environment.
• Neal Gompa about the challenges involved in shipping an immutable-base-system OS outside of single-purpose appliances (i.e. as a desktop OS for regular people, enthusiasts, and developers).
• Xaver Hugl live-debugged an issue on my laptop that he was able to speedily conclude was a Libinput bug.
• …and many more I didn’t have the remaining brain capacity to remember!

All of this was completely exhausting, and I had to excuse myself from a few group events and dinners to rest and process the day’s events. But Würzburg being a ridiculously beautiful city certainly helped!

Döner kebab count: 3

This has been my favorite Akademy so far, and thank you so much to everyone who helped to make it possible — David Redondo, Kieryn Darkwater, Victoria Fierce, Lydia Pintscher, and the rest of the Akademy team! Job’s a good ‘un, and I’ll see you around the internet!

Gamification on Drupal Websites Editor Fri, 09/13/2024 - 13:26

Gamification is the integration of game elements into non-gaming environments like websites to enhance user experiences. Its purpose is to make the user's experience more fun, motivating, and rewarding. Like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where players explore a big landscape full of problems and prizes, gamification adds excitement and advancement to typical digital platforms.
Drupal provides an excellent setting for incorporating gamification elements because it can adapt to changing needs. Like in the game, developers using Drupal can encourage users with rewards such as badges, points systems, and interactive tasks that create a feeling of accomplishment while also promoting involvement within the community.
This article provides a detailed look into combining gamification with Drupal's strong features. Grab a coffee, and let's begin our adventure utilizing Drupal's gamification.

A new record week: 26 MRs merged! :D Too much to cover, so going forward, I will only write about the most notable changes.

The simplified zoom interface landed thanks to Jesse “jessebaker” Baker and Gaurav “gauravvvv” — with not only better controls, but also a much smoother UX:

Smooth zoom with pinch and using the slider!
Issue #3464025, image by Jesse.

Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri, Jesse and Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins integrated the existing “undo” functionality with the component props form, resulting in the UX you’d hope:

Your browser does not support playing videos. You can download it instead.

When undoing, the component props form on the right-hand side updates and the preview updates in real-time.
Issue #3463618, video by Bálint.

Now that many fundamental pieces exist, it’s time to build upon the foundations that we have. Five weeks ago, Ben added Redux integration to the component props form, resulting in live updates. That started out with a limited set of form elements supported. Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang added support for one more this week: <select>.

SDC prop shapes using enum now work thanks to expanded Redux integration. For example, you can now change the column width.
Issue #3471083, image by Harumi.

(By the way: Bálint’s epic video showing undo/redo above? That’s also powered by the Redux integration!)

Bálint and Gaurav improved the UX by removing six lines of CSS: instead of an abstract placeholder being dragged and visualized in the currently hovered drop target, now a ghost of the component being moved is visible:

Ghost of the component at the drop target: better visualization of what is about to happen.
Issue #3469895, image by me.

Two weeks ago, we gained support for actual trees. This revealed a number of bugs in the UI that had up until that time, been ahead of the back end. Another one of those was squashed this week by Bálint, Ted and I: you can now actually drag components into empty slots :D

Missed a prior week? See all posts tagged Experience Builder.

Goal: make it possible to follow high-level progress by reading ~5 minutes/week. I hope this empowers more people to contribute when their unique skills can best be put to use!

For more detail, join the #experience-builder Slack channel. Check out the pinned items at the top!

Empowering SDC developers

Less visible, but equally important because it boosts the productivity of the fine folks working on the Starshot Demo Design System by making XB be more explicit about what Single-Directory Components (SDCs) prop shapes it provides a complete UX for. Since last week, a sibling Component config entity is auto-generated for every SDC meeting the minimum criteria. This week, Feliksas “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis expanded the list of criteria:

1. Since #3469461, any SDCs that we know for sure won’t work well in XB (yet!) no longer show up in the XB UI. (In more detail: when we have no way to store a particular prop shape yet: XB does not yet support type: array prop shapes yet, for example.)
2. Since #3470424, SDCs marked as obsolete won’t get a Component config entity auto-created. But if it already exists (and hence may be in use), the config entity is not deleted, just disabled.

Evidently that could lead to surprising situations, especially while developing SDCs. So, he’ll be adding a UI that lists the reason for an SDC not being available in XB next.

In the background, back end folks empowering the front end

Ted “tedbow” Bowman helped the back end race ahead of the front end: while we don’t have designs for it yet (nor capacity to build it before DrupalCon if they would suddenly exist), there now is an HTTP API to get a list of viable candidate field properties that are able to correctly populate a particular component prop. These are what in the current XB terminology are called dynamic prop sources 1 2.

Travis “traviscarden” Carden and I made XB’s use of OpenAPI go much further than it did when it landed 3 weeks ago): rather than only validating API response bodies, it now also validates request bodies — hence catching an entire category of bugs on the client-side automatically. Clearer errors = faster iteration!

Week 16 was August 26–September 1, 2024.

1. Dynamic Prop Sources are similar to Drupal’s tokens, but are more precise, and support more than only strings, because SDC props often require more complex shapes than just strings. ↩︎

2. This is the shape matching from ~3 months ago made available to the client side. ↩︎

• Drupal
• Acquia
• Experience Builder

• Smooth zoom with pinch and using the slider!
• Real-time updates of the props form and preview when undoing.
• Ghost of the component at the drop target: better visualization of what is about to happen.
• SDC prop shapes using `enum` now work thanks to expanded Redux integration.

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Enhance Drupal with the CKEditor 5 Plugin Pack: a free set of rich text editor enhancements at no cost for drupal web projects.

This week, I spoke with Eirik Morland again on the Beyond Blocks podcast about recent improvements to violinist.io, such as team/multi-user subscriptions.

Listen to the episode now.

I was great to speak to Eirik again and for him to be the first returning guest on the podcast.

Listen to the first episode with Eirik.

In this episode, we started down the path of migrating School Desk off of Heroku and onto Digital Ocean. Most of the effort was on tool changes and beginning to make a Dockerfile for deploying the app to the new setup.

Friday, 13 September 2024

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.6.0.

KDE Frameworks are 72 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.

This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

New in this version Attica

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

Baloo

• Set up crash handling for baloo_file. Commit.

Bluez Qt

• MediaTransport: Added setVolume. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

Breeze Icons

• Remove 48px draw-freehand symlink. Commit. Fixes bug #491887
• Add info(-symbolic) icon symlinks. Commit.
• Add new 64px dialog icons. Commit.
• Add icon for Apple Wallet passes bundle. Commit.
• Add battery icons with power profile emblems. Commit. See bug #483805
• Add remaining symbolic icons required for Discover. Commit.
• Update accessibility icons. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• Add system-reboot-update and system-shutdown-update icons. Commit.
• Add a couple of missing monochrome category icons. Commit.
• Don't generate symlinks for app icons if we not install the icons. Commit.
• Fix issues with zoom-map icons. Commit.
• Add Spinbox-specific decrease and increase icons. Commit. See bug #491312
• Make list-remove look like a red X. Commit.

Extra CMake Modules

• ECMQueryQt: don't cache QUERY_EXECUTABLE. Commit.
• Add fallback value for SASL_PATH. Commit.
• Add SASL_PATH to prefix.sh so that libkdexoauth2.so is found. Commit.
• Allow qml target to be actually optional. Commit.
• Fix FindLibExiv2 version detection from header. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• ECMEnableSanitizers: fix greedy linker parameter replacment. Commit.
• Add private code option to ecm_add_qtwayland_(client/server)_protocol. Commit.
• Add a PRIVATE_CODE option to ecm_add_wayland_server_protocol. Commit.
• Add [PRIVATE_CODE] also to the second signature of ecm_add_wayland_server_protocol. Commit.

KAPIDox

• Unify format string usage. Commit.
• Avoid double assignment. Commit.
• Remove unnecessary escape. Commit.
• COLS_IN_ALPHA_INDEX has been deprecated. Commit.
• Footer.html correct URL for trademark_kde_gear_black_logo.png. Commit.

KArchive

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

KAuth

• HelperSupport: don't send debug message on application shutting down. Commit.

KCalendarCore

• Export KCalendarCore namespace to QML. Commit.
• Add read support for xCal events. Commit.
• Add KF7 TODOs to make ICalFormat::fromString methods static. Commit.
• Refactor libical <-> KCalendarCore enum conversion. Commit.
• Avoid computing the next recurrence interval based on an invalid time. Commit.

KCMUtils

• Set a QQmlEngine property on the QApplication. Commit. Fixes bug #488965

KCodecs

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• Ensure we find test data on Windows. Commit.

KColorScheme

• Use passkey to avoid issues with private constructor. Commit.
• Additional public API. Commit.
• [kcolorschememanager] Fix crash. Commit. Fixes bug #492408
• Add KColorSchemeManager::instance in favor of public constructor. Commit.

KConfig

• KStandardAction: Use windowIcon for AboutApp icon again. Commit.
• Fix macro documentation. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• Fix warning from staterc migration when there's no "old" file to migrate. Commit.
• Update KF6 TODO comments to KF7 given that they weren't addressed in KF6. Commit.

KContacts

• Make the depedency to QML optional. Commit.

KCoreAddons

• ExportUrlsToPortal: check for dbus error. Commit.
• KDirWatch: don't try inotify again if it has already failed. Commit.
• Relicense some files from lgpl2-only to lgpl2.1-or-later. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• KPluginMetaData: Avoid reading metadata from plugin loader twice. Commit.
• Kcoreaddons_add_plugin: Fix typo in error message. Commit.
• Fix configuring error when QtQml is not around. Commit.

KCrash

• Document that KCrash::initialize should be called after KAboutData. Commit.
• Drop ptrace forwarding code. Commit.

KDBusAddons

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

KDeclarative

• QPixmapItem: Adjust rendering to dpr positioning. Commit. Fixes bug #481219

KDE Daemon

• Use KAboutData. Commit.
• Initialize KCrash. Commit.

KDNSSD

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

KFileMetaData

• UserMetadata: fix Win k_setxattr. Commit.
• [OfficeExtractor] Do not add word/line count if nothing has been extracted. Commit.
• [OfficeExtractor] Only try to extract content if PlainText is requested. Commit.
• [OfficeExtractor] Remove duplicate findExecutable calls, fix debug output. Commit.
• Cmake: Use KDE_INSTALL_FULL_LIBEXECDIR_KF instead of manual path mangling. Commit. Fixes bug #491462
• Add missing initializer for "Empty" PropertyInfo displayName. Commit.
• [Taglib] Use non-deprecated constructors for MPEG::File/FLAC::File. Commit.
• [Taglib] Replace deprecated length() with lengthInSeconds(). Commit.

KGlobalAccel

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

KGuiAddons

• Port towards QNativeInterface. Commit.
• Fail at CMake configure time if xcb Qt feature is not enabled. Commit.
• Waylandclipboard: Dont explicitly clear when transfering sources. Commit.
• [kjobwidgets] Store window in a QPointer. Commit. See bug #491637. See bug #448532
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• KOverlayIconEngine: Adjust to API change in Qt 6.8 in scaled pixmap hook. Commit.
• Generate wayland code with PRIVATE_CODE. Commit.

KHolidays

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

KI18n

• Spinboxdoc. Commit.
• Formatting. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• Fix test to actually use a QDoubleSpinBox as intended here. Commit.
• Unambiguous documentation of formatString. Commit.

KIconThemes

• Allow building without breeze-icons. Commit.
• Extend initTheme to ensure we properly follow the system colors. Commit.
• Add path for Android to theme locations. Commit.
• Take logical pixels in KIconEngine::createPixmap. Commit.
• [kiconengine] Adapt to Qt behavior change in scaledPixmap. Commit. Fixes bug #491677

KIdletime

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• Generate wayland code with PRIVATE_CODE. Commit.

KImageformats

• XCF: fix crash. Commit.
• README update. Commit.
• RGB: added options support. Commit.
• PCX: added options support. Commit.
• Fix crash on malformed files. Commit.

KIO

• Test: skip kfilewidgettest focus test in Wayland. Commit.
• KFileWidget: Fix selecting directories. Commit.
• [trash] Fix restoring entries with absolute paths in disk-local trash. Commit. Fixes bug #463751
• Add missing include. Commit.
• Also search kservices5 for service menus. Commit.
• Accept service menus that use ServiceTypes to specify their types. Commit. Fixes bug #478030
• Ignore application/x-kde-onlyReplaceEmpty in paste dialog. Commit. Fixes bug #492006
• Apply 1 suggestion(s) to 1 file(s). Commit.
• PasteDialog: hide application/x-kde-* formats from the combobox. Commit.
• PreviewJob: remove obsolete support X-KDE-Protocols aware thumbnailer. Commit.
• Fix documentation for ThumbnailRequest. Commit.
• Remove dead code for changing job priorities. Commit.
• Remove unused sslMetaData member. Commit.
• Remove unneeded friend. Commit.
• KFileWidget: Enable word wrapping for the message widget. Commit.
• Add missing include. Commit.
• Remove unused function. Commit.
• Consistently use WITH_QTDBUS instead of USE_DBUS. Commit.
• Previewjob: use contains instead of supportsMimetype. Commit.
• Document variable purposes and move EntryInfo definition to the start. Commit.
• KPropertiesDialog: Add "unknown" fallback. Commit.
• KPropertiesDialog: Use original URL for extra fields. Commit.
• Remove unneeded QPointer usage. Commit.
• PreviewJob: some refactoring. Commit.
• KUrlNavigator: Support modifiers on return similar to web browsers. Commit.
• PreviewJob: fix warnings and a todo. Commit.
• KDynamicJobTracker: Use widgets fallback if server says job tracker is required. Commit.
• Correctly escape unit names. Commit. Fixes bug #488854
• KRecentDocument: add removeApplication and removeUrl. Commit. See bug #480276
• Gui/kprocessrunner: normalize working directory. Commit. Fixes bug #490966
• DropJob: special-case "downloading http URLs" drop with better text. Commit.
• Don't show "Move" item in drop menu for source files accessed using http. Commit. Fixes bug #389600
• Set up crash handling for kiod. Commit.
• Deprecate leftovers from HTTP cache control. Commit.
• KUrlNavigator: Decode url title fully. Commit.
• Make sure KCrash works for kioworker. Commit.
• Previewjob: Use thumbnailer files for any mimetypes we don't have a plugin for. Commit.

Kirigami

• Disable cachegen. Commit. Fixes bug #488326
• PlaceholderMessage: Remove the icon opacity if the message is actionable. Commit.
• ToolBarLayout: Add test for dynamic actions. Commit.
• Read willShowOnActive value as Variant and convert to Bool. Commit.
• PrivateActionToolButton: Replace onVisibleChanged with Connections. Commit.
• Fix registration name for WheelEvent. Commit.
• [icon] Only reload icon from theme if the theme has that icon. Commit. Fixes bug #491806. Fixes bug #491854. Fixes bug #491848
• PrivateActionToolButton: Hide menu if button is hidden. Commit. Fixes bug #486107
• Allow recoloring of Android icon theme. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• [icon] Fix icon colors when using Plasma platformtheme and QIcon source. Commit. Fixes bug #491274
• ShadowedImage: Expose Image.status via a readonly alias. Commit.
• PromptDialog: fix buttons overflow. Commit.
• Relicense Chip to LGPL. Commit.
• Relicense LoadingPlaceholder to LGPL. Commit.

KItemModels

• Remove unused license text. Commit.
• Convert license statements to SPDX. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• Fix build without Qml. Commit.
• KColumnHeadersModel: Fix manual test. Commit.
• KExtraColumnsProxyModel: port to Qt 6.8's QIdentityProxyModel::setHandleSourceLayoutChanges. Commit.

KItemViews

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

KJobWidgets

• Only install D-Bus interface files when actually building with D-Bus. Commit.

KNewStuff

• Add especially crappy magic to deal with transient parents in actions. Commit. Fixes bug #491083
• Make staticxmlprovider (more) reentrant. Commit.
• Make AtticaProvider reentrant. Commit.
• Typos--. Commit.

KNotifications

• Don't set desktop file name for XDG activation token. Commit.

KPackage

• Add missing include guard. Commit.

KPlotting

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

KQuickCharts

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

KStatusNotifieritem

• Fix deprecation versions. Commit.
• Deprecate action collection access. Commit.

KTextEditor

• Make tests a bit faster. Commit.
• Fix clashing and missing keyboard accelerators. Commit.
• Add help texts for new editing commands. Commit.
• Move sort implementation to C++. Commit. Fixes bug #478250
• Move natsort to C++ and implement it using QCollator. Commit.
• Move the sortuniq, uniq implementation to C++. Commit. Fixes bug #478250
• Read and write font features to config. Commit.
• Fix doc.text() when first block is empty. Commit.
• Fix block splitting. Commit.
• Try to make test more robust. Commit.
• Restore previous indentation test mode based on individual files. Commit.
• Store startlines in the buffer instead of block. Commit.
• Doc: Fix code example for plugin hosting. Commit.
• No 10 second timeouts, the CI is not that consistent fast. Commit.
• Try to make test more stable. Commit.
• Improve encoding detection. Commit. Fixes bug #487594
• Fix grouping on config dialog page. Commit. Fixes bug #490617
• Optimize cursorToOffset. Commit.
• Dont indent on tab when in block selection mode. Commit. Fixes bug #448695
• Fix selection printing. Commit. Fixes bug #415570

KTextTemplate

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

KTextWidgets

• Fix unused-variable warning (with clang) when HAVE_SPEECH isn't set. Commit.
• Deprecate KPluralHandlingSpinBox. Commit.

KUserFeedback

• Tests: allow to disable testOpenGLInfoSource using envvar. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

KWallet

• Set up crash handling. Commit.
• Remove dead kdeinit code. Commit.

KWidgetsAddons

• Hide toolbar when not need (e.g. in tabbed view). Commit.
• FontChoose: Allow setting font features when selecting font. Commit. Fixes bug #479686
• Expand tabbar in KPageView. Commit.
• [kjobwidgets] Store window in a QPointer. Commit. Fixes bug #491637. See bug #448532
• Support page headers in KPageView. Commit.

KWindowSystem

• Generate wayland code with PRIVATE_CODE. Commit.

KXMLGUI

• Port to KStandardActions where possible. Commit.

Modem Manager Qt

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

Network Manager Qt

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

Prison

• Fix WITH_QUICK=OFF by moving ECMQmlModule behind the conditional. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

Purpose

• Fix sharing via menu a second time. Commit. Fixes bug #490579

QQC2 Desktop Style

• Read Smallest font settings from the proper config. Commit. Fixes bug #490890

Solid

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

Sonnet

• Revert "fail if none of the plugins can be build". Commit.
• Fail if none of the plugins can be build. Commit.
• Update file spellcheckhighlighter.cpp. Commit.
• Quick: Silence valgrind warnings. Commit.
• Fix uic warning. Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

Syntax Highlighting

• Inc version. Commit.
• Update QFace IDL Definition to support single line comments. Commit.
• Odin.xml: Multiple fixes to the syntax. Commit.
• QFace: WordDetect without trailing space. Commit.
• Bash: add \E, \uHHHH and \UHHHHHHHH String Escape, @k parameter transformation and & in string substitution. Commit.
• Zsh: add \E, \uHHHH, \UHHHHHHHH and sinle \ as String Escape. Commit.
• Add definition for the QFace IDL. Commit.
• Modelines: add missing variables and delete some that don't work. Commit.
• Add Kate Config syntax (.kateconfig file). Commit.
• Modelines: fix spaces after remove-trailing-spaces value ; multiple values now stop parsing. Commit.
• Modelines: fix indent-mode value and remove deprecated variables. Commit.
• Detect-identical-context.py: add -p to show duplicate content. Commit.
• XML: add parameter entity declaration symbol (% in ). Commit.
• Indexer: suggest removing .* and .*$ from RegExpr with lookAhead=1. Commit.
• PHP: add { in double quote string as a Backslash Code. Commit. Fixes bug #486372
• Zsh: fix escaped line in brace condition. Commit.
• Bash: fix escaped line in brace condition. Commit. Fixes bug #487978
• Nix: fix string in attribute access. Commit. Fixes bug #491436
• Optimize AbstractHighlighterPrivate::ensureDefinitionLoaded (highlighter_benchmark is 1.1% faster). Commit.
• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.
• Indexer: suggest replacing RegExpr with Int or Float when possible. Commit.
• Add JSX as an alternative name for JavaScript React (JSX) and TSX for TypeScript React (TSX). Commit.
• Indexer: check name and alternativeNames conflict ; update alternativeNames for generated files. Commit.
• Optimize Repository::addCustomSearchPath. Commit.
• Replace QList contextDatas with std::vector: implicit sharing is not useful. Commit.
• Prefer range-based loops to loop over iterators. Commit.
• Optimize Definition::foldingEnabled() by calculating the result during loading. Commit.
• Replace DefinitionRef type with DefinitionData* in immediateIncludedDefinitions. Commit.
• Remove code duplication related to context resolution. Commit.
• Replace std::cout / std::cerr with fprintf. Commit.
• Use QStringView as key for format. Commit.
• Replace QStringView::mid,left,right with sliced. Commit.
• Replace QString::split with QStringTokenizer to avoid unnecessary list construction. Commit.
• Orgmode: add syntax highlighting to some languages. Commit.
• Optimize Repository::definition[s]For*(). Commit.
• Reduce QFileInfo usage. Commit.
• Theme_contrast_checker.py: add --scores to modify rating values. Commit.
• Theme_contrast_checker.py: displays the selected color space. Commit.
• Theme_contrast_checker.py: fix label inversion between bold and normal text. Commit.
• Ksyntaxhighlighter6: add --background-role parameter to display different possible theme backgrounds. Commit.
• Ksyntaxhighlighter6: rename ansi256Colors format to ansi256. Commit.
• Theme_contrast_checker.py: fix help of -M parameter. Commit.
• Added a link to all available syntaxes and how to test a file in an isolated environment. Commit.
• Python: raw-string with lowercase r are highlighted as regex. Commit.
• JSON: fix float that start with 0. Commit.
• JSON: add jsonlines and asciicast v2 format extensions. Commit.

Threadweaver

• Ci: add Alpine/musl job. Commit.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1164 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 36.1 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 595 times according to Google Scholar.

Conrad released two small incremental releases to version 14.0.0. We did not immediately bring these to CRAN as we have to be mindful of the desired upload cadence of ‘once every one or two months’. But as 14.0.2 has been stable for a few weeks, we now decided to bring it to CRAN. Changes since the last CRAN release are summarised below, and overall fairly minimal. On the package side, we reorder what citation() returns, and now follow CRAN requirements via Authors@R.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.0.2-1 (2024-09-11)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.0.2 (Stochastic Parrot)

  • Optionally use C++20 memory alignment

  • Minor corrections for several corner-cases

• The order of items displayed by citation() is reversed (Conrad in #449)

• The DESCRIPTION file now uses an Authors@R field with ORCID IDs

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Yuvania Castillo

Backend Engineer

A graduate of the University of Costa Rica with a passion for programming, Yuvania is driven to constantly improve, study, and learn new technologies to be better every day.

January 1, 1970

Preparing for Drupal 11 is crucial to ensure a smooth transition, and we’re here to help you make it easy and efficient. This guide offers clear steps to update your environment and modules, perform thorough tests, and use essential tools like Upgrade Status and Drupal Rector.

Don’t fall behind! Making sure your site is ready for the new features and improvements Drupal 11 brings will make the upgrade work quick and easy.

Read on to learn how to keep your site updated and future-proof.

Ensure your environment is ready

• Upgrade to PHP 8.3: Ensure optimal performance and compatibility with Drupal 11
• Use Drush 13: Make sure you have this version available in your development or sandbox environment
• Database requirements: Ensure your database meets the requirements for Drupal 11:
  • MySQL 8.0
  • PostgreSQL 16
• Web server: Drupal 11 requires Apache 2.4.7 or higher. Keep your server updated to avoid compatibility issues.

Upgrade to Drupal 10.3. Before migrating to Drupal 11, update your site to Drupal 10.3 to handle all deprecations properly. Drupal 10.3 defines all deprecated code to be removed in Drupal 11, making it easier to prepare for the next major update.

Update contributed modules. Use Composer to update all contributed modules to versions compatible with Drupal 11. The Upgrade Status module will help identify deprecated modules and APIs. Ensure all modules are updated to avoid compatibility issues.

Fix custom code. Use Drupal Rector to identify and fix deprecations in your custom code. Drupal Rector automates much of the update process, leaving “to do” comments where manual intervention is needed. Perform a manual review of critical areas to ensure everything functions correctly.

Run tests in a safe environment. Conduct tests in a safe environment, such as a local sandbox or cloud IDE. It’s likely to fail at first, but it’s essential to run multiple tests until you achieve a successful result. Use:

• composer update --dry-run to simulate the update without making changes
• composer why-not drupal/core 11.0 if there are issues, identify which dependencies require an earlier version of Drupal

Compatibility tools. Install and use the Upgrade Status module to ensure your site is ready. This module provides a detailed report on your site’s compatibility with Drupal 11. Check for compatibility issues in contributed projects on Drupal.org using the Project Update Bot.

Back up everything. Before updating, ensure you have a complete backup of your code and database. This is crucial to restore your site if something goes wrong during the update.

Considerations for immediate upgrade

You may wonder if you should upgrade your site to Drupal 11 as soon as it’s available. Here are some pros and cons to consider:

• Maybe no: Sites can wait up till when the Drupal 10 LTS (long term support) ends (mid-late 2026) and then upgrade. This allows contributed modules to be fully ready for the update.
• Maybe yes: Upgrading early lets you take advantage of new features and improvements but may introduce new bugs. Additionally, if everyone waits to upgrade, it could delay the readiness of contributed modules for the new version.

While Drupal 10 will be supported for some time, it’s advisable to stay ahead with these updates to use the improvements they offer and ensure a smoother, optimized transition.

By following these steps and considerations, your Drupal site will be well prepared for the transition to Drupal 11, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted experience. Get ready for the new and exciting features Drupal 11 has to offer!

References

• Are You Ready for Drupal 11?
• Drupal 11 on Acquia
• YouTube: Preparing for Drupal 11
• Getting Ready for Drupal 11 – Slide Deck

The post Get ready for Drupal 11: An essential guide appeared first on Four Kitchens.