kompozer@jdll09
By Kazé on Tuesday, October 27 2009, 16:59 - Permalink
This year there’s been a lot of people representing the French-speaking Mozilla community at the JDLL in Lyon, France — 18 persons IIRC!
There were booth for XUL fr, FrenchMoz, Geckozone, FrenchBirds and for Mozilla Europe, Mozilla Women… as well as KompoZer, of course.
I’ve had the opportunity to give a talk on KompoZer 0.8, in front of more people than I expected for a relative small event. I could present the work I’ve been doing on KompoZer for the last twelve months and give a mini-roadmap about the future of this project.
Cédric Corazza and Frédéric Chateaux (l10n lead and QA lead, respectively) spent most of their time at the KompoZer booth, while I was rather away discussing about KompoZer with other developers — especially about html2pdf. Cédric also took some time on the booth to make localized builds of KompoZer 0.8b1, more on that soon.
Here are a few common reactions we got at the booth:
“I’m not using KompoZer any more because it crashes on my latest Mandriva / Ubuntu distro”
As mentioned on kompozer.net: KompoZer 0.7 is not compatible with GTK ≥ 2.14, hence the crashes. We’ve explained that to all Linux distros, but Ubuntu and Mandriva didn’t get it.
It should have been solved for Ubuntu 9.04 but Asac pushed a last-minute patch to include KompoZer 0.7.10 instead of 0.8a4 in Jaunty Jackalope; now the KompoZer repository should be sync’ed on the Debian one (maintained by Giuseppe “Derevko” Iuculano), so the problem’s solved.
About Mandriva, I’ve met a Mandriva contributor there and took the time to explain him the problem. I hope the next Mandriva release will ship KompoZer 0.8, we’ll see…
Nvu was a bunch of crap, but KompoZer seems to rock!
(ahem) well, glad you like it then.
It looks like SeaMonkey Composer!
SeaMonkey Composer 2.1 will look a lot more like KompoZer, since we’re about to merge a big part of the code.
Why isn’t KompoZer an official Mozilla Community Project?
Bad question. You should rather ask why nobody’s working on the <editor> any more…
Who’s working on KompoZer?
The whole team is in front of you: one developer, one l10n lead, one QA lead. Feel free to join!
Who’s financing KompoZer?
Nobody, that’s why I’ve put ugly ads on the website to get a few hundred bucks. Feel free to click on the big, orange button on kompozer.net.
Why is the website so ugly?
Obviously because there’s no web designer in the KompoZer team. Feel free to send us an alternate stylesheet, that’d be very welcome!
I’ve been pleased to see that the new features in KompoZer 0.8b1 (DOM Explorer, split view, site manager…) have met people’s expectations. Aiming KompoZer as a better learning tool seems to make sense, and the planned features for the 0.9 branch (Bespin code editor, XML-RPC publication, CSS template manager…) should raise more interest among advanced users.
Comments
merci les petits français !
Thanx for providing what so far has been a very stable piece of software. I keep seeing the term "templates", but where do I find them?
Vraiment merci pour l'excellent travail accompli. Félicitations pour ce logiciel importante, et tous les ajouts. Maintenant, il est beaucoup plus fonctionnel!
Merci bien
Gianpaolo
Thanks for the update, presentation & info on the team.
Regarding the presentation: you have a ? next to 1999 on the history of Composer. Wasn't it first released in 1996 when Netscape 3.0 Gold was unleashed to the world? I think the first one was Atlas Gold Preview Release 1 (late May/early June?). :)
@Mark: you can create your own templates and/or grab some from places such as:
http://kompozer.net/css/themes.php
david > actually, I don’t know exactly what should be considered as the starting point of the Composer project. Does Netscape count (proprietary software is evil)? Do the pre-release Mozilla milestones count? I couldn’t even find when the first Netscape Composer has been released…
Since I’ve always used Composer and its variants as my documentation editor, I’ve looked for the oldest HTML documentation that was on my HDD. It was written in october, 1999 — I remember I used the “HTML tags” view to understand the basics of the HTML structure but I can’t say whether it was Netscape or Mozilla. The next year, I started to write scripts to reformat the code with HTML Tidy and to convert the HTML source to HLP, CHM and PDF — which means I had to learn Java, XML, XSLT, etc.
To make it short: I don’t know when the Composer project started, but for *me* it all began in 1999. ;-)
Thank you David for the link. That's the starting point I was looking for! Then I will move onto creating my own templates. Unfortunately coding is not my fortè (sic?).
Thanks for the update :)