qooxdoo-contrib 3.0

For many years now an infrastructure for user-provided contributions to the qooxdoo framework has been available. As most of you certainly know, it goes by the name of “qooxdoo-contrib”.

While sticking to the very name, it has seen many significant changes over time. For instance, from its initial SVN repo at Sourceforge; over its deep (but often problematic) integration into the framework’s toolchain; all the way to a semi-dynamic, web-based catalog. Nevertheless it (mostly) kept moving into the right direction, trying to make it easier to collect, manage and use contributions to qooxdoo.

Just recently qooxdoo-contrib has been brought into a fairly decent state, allowing for easier participation. Much feedback from users and contributors has been incorporated into its fundamental overhaul.

To test-drive the new infrastructure, we invited Norbert Schröder for his recent theme contributions. He successfully managed to add, modify and publish the following three themes — all by himself:

The former qooxdoo-contrib has now been switched to the new infrastructure. That doesn’t mean qooxdoo-contrib is “done”. There are still some tasks to get rid of the old infrastructure entirely.

Moreover, qooxdoo-contrib might even look quite different in the future. Not just in terms of a nicer presentation, maybe also in its technical base for managing user-contributed packages. But that also depends on you. Because its further evolution (in terms of appearance, content, infrastructure) can now — for the first time — be handled according to the need and engagement of the community. The infrastructure of qooxdoo-contrib has therefore been made self-contained, transparently being hosted at Github, allowing but also requesting interested people to engage in improving it.

The current state of qooxdoo-contrib may be just an intermediate milestone, but a good starting point for the community to further improve it. For instance, to streamline it, to make it fool-proof, to automate it. Get familiar with the current infrastructure and the procedures, check out its concise documentation at Github. Pull requests welcome. Feel free to use the qooxdoo-devel mailing list for discussions.

On a side note, the work on the new qooxdoo-contrib, built upon a transparent Github infrastructure for easier management and collaboration, was also to evaluate to move other parts of the qooxdoo project over to Github. I.e. not only leveraging Git repos, but gh-pages or wiki (instead of the Dokuwiki-based homepage), issue tracking (instead of Bugzilla), etc. Some of the project’s proprietary infrastructure just needs to be replaced by more manageable solutions, open for participation. While this is still work in progress and under evaluation, it’s certainly the way to go to allow for easier management and collaboration of the qooxdoo project in general. Stay tuned.