I have requested and received a partial sponsorship for a trip to Berlin to participate in the Core Apps Hackfest. This is a great opportunity for me to meet up with other from the GNOME community and immerse myself in contributing. I’ll be going on Saturday the 26th and leave again Tuesday the 29th. Some things I anticipate I’ll be doing includes:

Polari Whereabouts

The hackfest will be an opportunity to meet up with Florian and discuss design for Polari 3.24. Danny, a good friend of mine is currently working on Initial Setup based on mockups by Allan Day. For Polari 3.24 Rares Visalom might be looking into implementing blank states and we also hope to land room lists this cycle.

Quality Assurance on listed Newcomer Applcations

The hackfest is a great opportunity to meet a lot of maintainers of different core applications of which are listed as Newcomer applications. I think it could be a useful opportunity to go over the newcomer bugs and identify ways we can improve the in-flow of bugs, the expected level of difficulty and so forth.

Revamp Newcomer Applications to the new TemplateFancy

I have babbled a long time about wanting to get rid of the ugly HTML tables we currently use to make “fancy” layouts in the GNOME wiki. As part of the Newcomer initiative I made the TemplateFancy template which is now required to be used by applications listed in the Newcomer guide. I investigated how to add custom CSS classes with MoinMoin wiki and Tom Tryfonidis has managed to complete convert the template from using HTML tables to custom CSS classes. This has resulted in a webpage which has easier-to-read MoinMoin markup, separation of content and layout and which possibly is more mobile-friendly.

Furthermore, these custom classes are generic and can be applied anywhere on the GNOME wiki, providing much better opportunity to make visually pleasing documentation. This really excites me! We can be much more flexible in terms of how we want to visualize information and I’m hoping this can lead to a more pleasing experience. These custom classes has already landed so I’ll looking at converting newcomer application pages to the new template markup this weekend. :-)

If I have time this weekend I’ll also look into getting these classes and examples of how to use them documented on the wiki. But most of all I’m looking forward to getting my batteries recharged and participate in the many discussions listed in the agenda on how to bring GNOME’s core applications forward. Thanks to GNOME Foundation for sponsoring part of this trip!