On October 1st, Collabora Online moved to its new home on GitHub, and started settling in the new infrastructure, expanding its fantastic community, and continuing the work to deliver the latest and greatest developments in productivity and collaboration together. Check our new community website for all the details! ;)

Collabora developers also keep fixing and improving our lovely mother project LibreOffice. As all the good work requires some appreciation, let’s take a look at what the seasoned developers of the Collabora team and the volunteer contributors from our community have been doing during the last week.

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 32 authors have pushed 76 commits to master and 131 commits to all branches. On master, 217 files have changed and there have been 74,239 additions and 30,898 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from October 26, 2020 to November 02, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Kuesji Koesnu and Rashesh Padia for their first pull requests, and Simon Nussbaum and Hamdi Gümüş for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Kuesji Koesnu for authoring a script to extract translator credits from the commit log of the repository. We can now properly thank our translation contributors!
• Thanks to Rashesh Padia for improving debugging of Collabora Online by adding incoming and outgoing Postmessages to the debug mode.
• Thanks to Simon Nussbaum and Hamdi Gümüş for reporting bugs regarding a DOCX view issue on Android app and a font issue on iOS app.

Thank you all, and welcome aboard! :)

Join the fun!

You can also join the fun, and be part of our next list of new contributors! :)

Just go to our GitHub repo, fork it, build it (on Linux or on any platform), grab one of our newcomer-friendly easy hacks, and send your first pull request. And if you get stuck at any point, just drop by one of our communication channels. ;)

Highlights

COOL is Now on DEV Community!

We have just joined the DEV Community, which is a place where connections are made and experiences are shared by developers for developers. Please feel free to follow us there and discuss your ideas and opinions on the published articles.

DEV Community: A constructive and inclusive social network. Open source and radically transparent.

Collaborans on the LibreOffice & openSUSE Shared Conference

The LibreOffice Conference 2020, this year also known as oSLO 2020, took place from 15 to 17 October 2020 as a joint online event with openSUSE. During the conference, members of the Collabora team contributed with talks on various topics including Collabora Office, Collabora Online, and the Mobile apps. Most of them are available as slides and video recordings. Check out the related blog post for more info. ;)

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for making sure form fields are now properly activated while multiple users are collaboratively working on a document, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for improving UX on Calc documents by removing the intrusive tooltips from the formula bar, making it easier to work with frozen cells and split panes by fixing an issue which caused some cells not being properly shown in such cases, and ensuring that pasting color values to color picker works properly on Impress documents.
• Thanks to Gökay Şatır for making hyperlink features available in context menus of Calc, Impress, and Draw documents, and assuring quality of the Copy Hyperlink Location feature through extensive testing.
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for continuing to make COOL more beautiful and visually consistent, by disableing outline on non-form elements, fixing long strings on message dialogs in mobile views, and restricting mobile-related css rules to work only on mobile views, thus reducing css pollution.
• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for improving UX on mobile view by correcting the alignment of checkboxes on message dialogs, and adding the missing useCanvasLayer method, thus fixing the build on master which was accidentally broken by a backport.
• Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Font Color, Highlight Color, Insert Table, Insert Image and Insert Hyperlink.
• Thanks to Thaís Vieira for improving the visual consistency of COOL through improvements such as fixing padding on Insert Shapes dialog, and also ensuring the quality of various mobile view menus through testing.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving the stability and reliability of COOL by fixing a potential crash that could happen in a specific scenario of a failed document load followed by a save operation.
• Thanks to Mert Tümer and Pedro Silva, it is now easier than ever to make Collabora Online coherent in terms of look and feel with your integration or installation. Check out the blog post for details. ;)

New in 6.4: Them it via CSS Variables

• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for fixing various issues on the mobile side, including making sure row and column headers match the grid, thus improving visual consistency and UX.
• Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for removing[0][1] some unused Poco headers, thus potentially reducing compile times of Collabora Online a bit. He has also made sure we are in compliance with the no-prototype-builtins rule of eslint 6.0.0, thus improving security and stability by makign sure we are future-proof against potential bugs which could arise from unexpected input values being parsed as properties.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for improving localization support by making it possible to localize all strings on the status bar.
• Thanks to Andreas Kainz for updating the arrangement of the File menu bar, thus improving visual consistency and UX of Collabora Online, along with various other improvements around menu bars.[0][1]
• Thanks to Jan Dagefoerde for cleaning up HTTP header writing duplication by introducing a new helper class with a method to log errors, and calling the new method at various locations, thus reducing code-duplication.[0][1][2]
• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for improving encapsulation in some classes by turning some public members to private, thus decreasing the chance of misusages in the future.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for improving the stability of the iOS app, by fixing an issue which caused a crash at certain times when the text insertion caret is left in a cell of a table on a Writer document, and paving the way for making the help file available on mobile apps.

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Thomas Müller for updating localizations of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration based on the latest translations contributed on transifex.
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for making sure CSS variables are properly passed to COOL on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.

Honorable Mentions

• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for improving the related release engineering bits to allow us to have faster release builds for Collabora Online 6.4 series and improving testing infra for integrations, along with various other tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
• Thanks to Pedro Silva for doing various improvements on our community page, reviewing pull requests, and sharing his design magic with us, other contributors through participation in discussions in various channels including LibreOffice Design Meetings, issue reports and pull requests on GitHub.
• Thanks to Marc Rodrigues for continuing to keep us updated on various news around Collabora Online and related FOSS projects, and creating a lot of yummy content to read!
• Thanks to Mike Kaganski for working on new integrations and also helping with maintaining our forum, handling administrative tasks.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• Thanks to Cor Nouws for leading the marketing team, and not stopping there but continuing with testing & reporting bugs, attending to community events, and keeping us all informed about what’s going on. He also attends LibreOffice Design meetings from time to time to help COOL’s mother project LibreOffice have a better UI & UX.
• Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for doing a lot of research on different topics, and providing mentoring/patch-reviewing/hand-holding/wisdom within the team, in our communication channels, and also on various channels of our lovely mother project LibreOffice.
• Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presence bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

Last but not least, we can’t thank enough to our translators who constantly help COOL and its friends talk many languages on this earth. Collabora Online speaks many languages, thanks to all of our translators in our translation project, and all of those who previously contributed and keeps contributing to our mother project, LibreOffice.

We’re continuing to work to find good ways to credit translators’ hard work in the product. Please see a list of those involved, and please get in touch if you’re not listed. Many thanks to all those who have worked on translating Online, you rock!

If you would like to help COOL speak your language, you can just go to our translation project on weblate, and start contributing! ;)

Collabora Online translation project on Weblate

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

We’re still contributing to LibreOffice and encourage you too to do so because LibreOffice rocks. ;)

• Thanks to Dennis Francis, Michael Meeks, and Noel Grandin for various fixes[0][1][2][3] and performance improvements around spell-checking on Calc.
• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for improving PDF handling of Draw by fixing an issue that caused certain PDF documents getting bigger on each save & load cycle, resulting in stability and performance problems.
• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving DOCX compatibility by fixing a bug that caused certain documents with multiple pages showing up as if they had only one page after import, and by ensuring that DOCX documents are properly recognized even when they have an odd size of 0 KB, and also for mentoring other members of the team while fixing various issues.
• Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for continuing his efforts towards making LibreOffice buildable on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).