Apache OpenOffice has hit the 30 millions downloads mark in just 9 7 months, and become one of our top downloads. We are glad to be part of this success, and we are proud to provide our continuous engineering contribution to the project.
In fact, just after ApacheCon Europe we started working on feedback and ideas collected from the participants to our talk about Improving Apache OpenOffice Extensions and Templates sites as well as from the members of ooo-dev@ mailing-list.
Below you’ll find the list of new features we’ll be working on in the next months.
1) Platform and Content Migration to Drupal 7. The two sites, now on Drupal 5 (unsupported) and Drupal 6, will be brought to the same platform. Common code will work on both sites without need to be adapted. This will bring improvements in performance, user experience and multilingual support. All users, passwords (if applicable), and content will be preserved during conversion.
2) Technical improvements. Automatic management of updates will be available on Extensions, to enable update notifications in OpenOffice. The site will export RSS feeds with new content.
3) Search improvements. Search will be switched to an Apache Solr backend; this allows much faster search, autocomplete of search terms, “Did you mean” suggestions and “Saved searches” for each registered user.
4) Web 2.0 services. The sites will support RSS feeds to export specific searches (latest dictionaries, templates matching
“curriculum”) to other sites. New content will automatically be posted on dedicated Twitter channels. It will be possible to share on Facebook/Twitter each extension/template and to rate the content with the familiar 5-star widget.
5) Branding possibilities, replicated repositories. The sites can display different content and branding if called with different domain names (e.g., show only open source extensions when called as open.extensions.openoffice.org). The sites can also be easily replicated and reinstalled with full functionality (e.g., for a company-wide internal repository of extensions or templates).
During the process we’ll keep providing users support, including helping anyone who needs to understand the configuration changes.
I have huge difficulty with MS style of boys-toys with Windows dumbed down for the illiterate.
Have we approached a time where nobody can read one word and interpret its meaning?
I like my UI clean and simple to do “work” — not play!. MS do not give us non-players any choices, but MS feed off the “toys” approach to make money.
When I discovered Classic Shell” about 3 weeks ago I have been very impressed with the adaptability of Classic Shell.
And to have upgrades that are improvements not just adding 5 other ways to do one task (bloat) and call it progress
I am delighted with “Classic Shell” it gives me back simplicity, Unfortunately CS cannot remove the inherited bloat of Win 7 but at least it gives me back a “clean” font end. Thank you for a brilliant project.
(Autocad and MS Office programmer for serious professionals)