1. wgo GNOME Products

This page is a draft being discussed at [1] [2]

1.1. Summary

"Products" is a wgo section where we showcase the best GNOME desktop components and applications. Each product has one page with the essentual information, screenshots and relevant links. The idea is to have the contents in DOAP so it can be reused by the projects subsites. The maintenance of these pages is done jointly by the Marketing Team and the projects developers. The products data is in a database to make it easy to search and make listings based on OS, category etc.

• See this diagram GnomeWeb/NewWgoStructure/gnomeproductpages.pdf to see the relation between products pages and their projects websites.

1.2. Requirements

GNOME products list and pages are:

• Good starting points to discover the software we consider useful for our users.
• Introduce the product in a brief and tasty way like the trailer of a film or the review of a book.
• Translated in several languages so a lot of people can access them.
• Maintained jointly by the Marketing Team and the developers using DOAP.

GNOME products list and pages are not:

• A GNOME software map. http://gnomefiles.org accomplishes much better this function.

• A complete list of official GNOME software. This will be provided one day by GnomeCertification

• A substitute or shadow of the corresponding product/project websites. These pages should promote them.
• A plain duplication of effort.

Related GnomeWeb/UseCases :

• All audiences:
  1. I'm looking for a program to do this
  2. What does your software and how does it look like
  3. I'm looking for free downloads, I'm a Windows/Mac user, no idea what you mean with the beer and speech thing
  4. I want to learn as much as possible about application X / GNOME
  5. I want to receive news and updates about GNOME / about application X

  6. I want to know about the latest & coolest unstable GNOME software

  7. I want to understand the pieces that form GNOME
  8. I want to follow the development of GNOME / of application X
• Press
  1. Do you have GNOME software useful for press / media?
• ISDs
  1. We want to know about ISDs and commercial products using GNOME
  2. Overview of the GNOME architecture and development platform
• Contributors
  1. I want to know everything about product/project/team X
  2. I want to host my project in GNOME

1.3. Tasks

1. Implementing a branch of the current product PloneSoftwareCenter to be able to export data in DOAP format. Since this modification will affect not only the product that will end up on the wgo but also the final PloneSoftwareCenter product (hopefully), we will implement a DOAP representation for all the fields present in the product itself that are representable in DOAP according to the specifications. See Developers Information for details.

2. Define the fields / types of information of the products.
3. Define the workflows with the projects' teams.
4. Select the initial set of products to feature.
5. Produce the contents.

6. As soon as GnomeWeb/LooknFeel policies adopted and a general theme adopted create/adapt template(s) for application's website

1.4. Tasks accomplished

• Set a relation with gnomefiles.org - DONE. We have agreed a link in the GNOME Products page and use the 100% free software feeds http://www.gnomefiles.org/files/gnomefiles2.xml and http://gnomefiles.org/files/gnomefiles2.txt

• We will go with Plone (SimoneDeponti)

1.5. Developers Information

1.5.1. General information

The DOAP export of the data will be implemented through a template named doap_feed(.pt). This template will use views to retrieve data, to be fully compatible with Plone 2.5 and future releases. At the time of the branch, the views used to display content in (X)HTML were not complete, and might be subject to changes in trunk, so might be a good policy to merge changes that are made to the views from the trunk to the doap branch. Another good policy should be not to modify the views that already exists: if there is a need to have a view export things in a different manner than those view does, the developer write a new view (e.g.: if you think project.py fails to present the data in a usable way, create project-doap.py and use that in your template, although before doing such things is better to discuss it in gnome-web mailing list). All changes to templates, styles, and workflows will be made in an external product that will be started as soon as the DOAP support is available on PloneSoftwareCenter. There is however a dependency on PloneSoftwareCenter itself, since the UI of the product itself (v2) is still not completely defined and implemented.

1.5.2. Access to the codebase

Anyone who wishes to contribute to the project must be in possess of the following requirements:

• Be in possess of all the requirements needed to contribute to the developement of the wgo (subscription to the gnome-web mailing list is vital).
• Be a registered user on plone.org.

The codebase is located on plone collective and information on how to obtain commit access can be obtained on plone developement doc and on the realtive Trac.

1.5.3. General policies

Here are listed some simple policies that contributors should honor in order to keep the development process as clean and linear and possible:

• Do not commit anything that breaks the product, e.g. makes it impossible to install, crashes Zope startup, or does not make the content render correctly, sematic-wise (e.g.: if it's a CSS problem but the markup is correct a commit is acceptable).
• Make a single commit for any file modified, including a short list of the changes made in the comment. Mass (batch) commits of files should be avoided, because they tend to make the tracking of changes hard.

1.6. Structure

The page structure proposed at GnomeWeb/NewWgoStructure is:

• Products - Section's main page. Contains an explanation of desktop components and applications; and explanation of software for users, administrators and developers; an explanation of operative systems supported; the tools to search products.

  • [Product X] - Multiple pages generated by the database featuring a product each. The following indexes link to them.
  • Applications index - Software for users.

  • Windows compatible applications index - See MarketingTeam/GnomeOnWindows

  • Mac compatible applications index - See MarketingTeam/GnomeOnWindows

  • Sysadmin index - Software for sysadmins
  • Developer index - Software for developers
  • Desktop index - Index of the desktop components comprehensible to sysadmins and developers.
  • Submit your product - Instructions to add your product.

The main page and the rest of pages containing indexes have a gnomefiles.org block saying something like: Here is a list of featured GNOME products. For a complete GNOME software map check gnomefiles.org

1.6.1. Worflow

(((Needs review ! This isn't particularly clear in my head -- SimonRozet)))

• Project maintainers can use our "CMS" as a DOAP frontend and then use /products>/<product>/doap to publish their project's info

• Features aren't visible since the MarketingTeam haven't published it

• Project maintainer registers
• Project maintainer adds his product

• If MarketingTeam want to feature this product :

  • (optional) Marketing team improve the product's presentation

  • MarketingTeam publishes it (the feature isn't visible before)

1.6.2. Product page structure

1.7. Mockup

There is a mockup and atarballor abzr branch.

1.8. Product pages candidates

This list is far from being final. We better start with a limited set of products with the active collaboration of their developers, and then increase. It would be useful to have products features in the 2.18 release notes, so we can essay a notes-products-projects integration.

• Deskbar www personal homepage

• ekiga www]

• epiphany www

  • Epiphany (and maybe Gedit, Rhythmbox) will have the cool NewStuffManager available sometime in the future, there should be a chance for products like this to have a section that mimics art.gnome.org so users can get extensions (and if NSM is integrated nicely in Epiphany maybe you'll be able to install this extensions from the browser. So a way to add data dinamically (with some interaction like Rating, Comments) should be possible. DiegoEscalanteUrrelo

• evince www

• Evolution www

• Gcalctool

• Gconf www

• gdm www

• gedit www

• gimp www

• gnome-games www

• GNOME Office

  • Abiword www

  • eog www

  • Gnumeric www

• GNOME Power Manager www

• GNOME Screensaver

• GNOME System Tools www

• gnome-terminal [www]
• Metacity [no website]

• Nautilus www

• Network Manager ?? www

• Pessulus [no website] gnomefiles

• rhythmbox www

• Sabayon www

• totem www

• XChat www

• Yelp [www]

1.9. References

See also some work done in the past:

• http://gnome-apps.berlios.de/

• The page attached at http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2006-August/msg00046.html

1.10. Comments

"Why not to use the same categories as the Applications menu?" -- JoachimNoreiko

• I think JoachimNoreiko's suggestion is great because that's much clearer to the user to have the same categories in GNOME Software Map and in his Applications menu.

• I like the idea. MurrayCumming

• We could also use the same icons to identifiy the categories and, of course, the applications. In general, I think it would be good that the GNOME website would be as similar to the GNOME desktop as possible. QuimGil

  • Note that this is relevant only to the applications of the Desktop release suite. QuimGil

• Some of the proposed products in the list above are not really part of GNOME, eg GIMP. -- Joachim

• Maybe the idea can be extended to the point of making Nautilus emblems and Applications menu icons some sort of tags or topics. So if I open Gedit page I would see the Accessories icon and a Documents icon?. -- DiegoEscalanteUrrelo

• gnomefiles.org: I saw that all content on gnomefiles.org is copyrighted to OSNews. I would wish that we would have a site where the content is CC-BY-SA or GFDL. This would also allow mirroring.