extensions.gnome.org: yesterday, today and tomorrow

During last 3 years extensions.gnome.org website was unmaintained, accumulated unresolved bugs and still used old unmaintained Django 1.4 framework.

Things are changed today, below you will find recent changes.

Django 1.8 LTS migration.

We had migrated codebase from Django 1.3 to 1.8 and website from Django 1.4 to 1.8 (big thanks to Andrea Veri for this).

Because migration was done “as is” new direct platform features are not used currently, however we can already benefit from internal indirect platform improvements. For more information about Django changes look to 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8 release notes.

Site theme updated.

Site theme was synchronized with GNOME Grass wordpress theme and logo was updated to match other GNOME websites.

Look to the old…

… and new site header.

UI improvements.

With integration plugin or browser extension control buttons are now aligned to the right and “delete” button is stylized to match other buttons:

System extensions now have explicit mark and no “delete” button is shown for them:

If you have extensions installed that is missing from extensions.gnome.org then grayscale icon will be shown:

Also site layout is fixed for low resolution screens, screenshots are shown in lightbox now and description is aligned to title.

Bugfixes.

Some minor and more serious bugs were fixes and some patches were merged. I still continue to working on existing issues.

So, What is next?

Internationalization.

In 2017 we should have GNOME Shell extensions repository to be translated to other languages. I plan to bring translations support to e.g.o. via GNOME Translation project.

For that goal it’s possible to reuse Damned-Lies translations support which is Django 1.8 powered website.

Improving help.

“About” page is outdated and should be rewriten. There is a lot of bugs where filled in Bugzilla asking to improve it.

Inline installation of GNOME Shell integration browser extension.

GNOME Shell integration for Chrome suports Chrome/Chromium, Firefox, Vivaldi and Opera browsers. However it should be manually installed from browser extensions store.

I plan to improve this by allowing inline extensions installation from extensions.gnome.org website.

User control panel.

Currently it’s not possible to do any user account related changes yourself.

Some user control panel will be created allowing to change username, email. View owned extensions and more.

 

To track this and future changes you can  follow Roadmap wiki page.