Three weeks ago, 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, 27 authors have pushed 85 commits to master, and 163 commits to all branches. On master, 313 files have changed and there have been 27,120 additions and 17,247 deletions.

Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from October 18, 2020 to October 25, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Ayhan Yalçınsoy, Nicolas Christener, Irina Hristova, Gleb Popov, and Jan Dagefoerde for their first pull requests, and omeringen, Sys-Admin889, and Nicolas Christener for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

• Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for fixing code styling issues on our Javascript files towards upgrading our eslint version to 4.0.0. This will bring a bunch of fixes and improvements for one of our depended-on libraries. He has also done some clean-up on our C++ files, removing some unused variables and includes, thus potentially reducing the compile times a bit more, which means less wait and more coding time for developers!
• Thanks to Nicolas Christener for improving our issue templates by creating an issue for the missing pieces, and also fixing it by creating a pull request. This should increase the quality of the newly created issues, thus potentially decreasing the time to resolve them.
• Thanks to Irina Hristova for upgrading our eslint version to 5.0.0. This will help us ensure consistent styling and catch certain coding errors by static-analysis before they get into the code-base.
• Thanks to Gleb Popov for adding a case for FreeBSD into our build scripts. He seems determined to follow-up on that to bring full support on a new platform.
• Thanks to Jan Dagefoerde for replacing some external library calls with standard methods, thus increasing maintainability a bit and bringing us closer to the standard C++.
• Thanks to omeringen and Sys-Admin889 for reporting an enhancement request and a missing feature regarding sheets on mobile and web.

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.

Oh, last but not least: We are also participating in the Hacktoberfest. So don’t forget to check our hacktoberfest issues. ;)

Highlights

Collabora Online (COOL)

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for continuing to make COOL more beautiful and visually consistent, by hiding unnecessary break elements on the formula bar, some standardization on the SVG icons, and removing unnecessary CSS rules.
• Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for fixing various issues on the mobile side, including making sure the Calc grid is properly aligned with the headers, and making the sheets visually consistent.[0][1][2] He has also added a new way of pasting images by integrations, allowing them to directly paste into the document.
• Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online, such as search bar tests in Writer, Calc and Impress on mobile view, on top of the tests he wrote in the last week on saving, removing, replying, resolving comments.[0][1] He has also upgraded our cypress version from 5.1.0 to 5.3.0, fixing an unexpected behavior of stopped tests.

• Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Italics, Underline, Strikethrough, Font-size, Clear direct formatting, Font-style, Style Combobox, Highlight color, and Font color.

  

  Cypress is a JavaScript end to end testing framework for any project running in a browser.

• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for fixing a bug which sometimes caused an error and high CPU load while saving, making sure the Clear Direct Formatting icon always has a tooltip displayed, ensuring that PDF annotations are properly saved even when the user doesn’t explicitly click on “Save comments”, adding the Format Page button into Calc notebookbar, which was present on Writer and classic toolbar, and being missed in the notebookbar of Calc, and ensuring that the correct language is set while creating a notebookbar.

• Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for improving user experience on mobile views by removing the context menu items which were trying to open tunneled dialogs unsuccessfully. He also made sure the caret is properly displayed and followed after idling out (by waiting inactively for a long period of time) and resuming a document.

• Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for a lot of fixes and improvements, primarily towards better stability, performance and security.

• Thanks to Andreas Kainz for fixing an icon, thus improving visual consistency of Collabora Online. He has also added CSS theming support to shape icons, thus allowing to have a more coherent look and feel.

• Thanks to Dilaver Demirel for helping us reduce the code-base’s dependence on external libraries, and bringing it closer to the standard C++, by replacing more instances of Poco::DateTimeFormatter with a built-in utility method.

• Thanks to Pelin Kuran and Buğra Kurt for working towards eslint upgrade bit by bit through a number of pull requests,[0][1], and then finally doing the upgrade to the 4.0.0 version. This brings us a better tool to check our JavaScript code against styling issues and common errors.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

• Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for making notebookbar work on the iOS app, and ensuring[0][1] no tooltips are generated for the related items on mobile apps; it will be enabled by default on iPads, aiming to increase usability. He also did various other fixes and improvements around localization and developer documentation,[0][1][2] and ensured the Copy Hyperlink Location command works properly on iOS.
• Thanks to Mert Tümer for continuing on improving his latest work on bringing theme support to the Android app, making theming related CSS variables configurable from the user interface also for partner integrations.

Collabora Online Integrations

• Thanks to Andras Timar and Yunusemre Şentürk for releasing a new version of Collabora Online’s Mattermost plugin, along with various improvements both from the Collabora team and the community, such as adapting the app to Collabora Online’s new discovery response allowing multiple actions per app by Mike Kaganski, fixing an issue which was preventing editing documents other than PDF by a mysterious contributor, Baco. This release also brings compatibility with COOL 6.4.
• Thanks to Semih Serhat Karakaya for extending the wopi token expiration time of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration to 10 hours as suggested by the project docs from its previous value of 30 minutes, preventing repetitive consumption of time on token renewal on a short period of time, thus leaving more time to spend on productivity.
• Thanks to Phil Davis for improving readability of and future-proofing Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration by fixing a few issues on the php side, and thanks to Michael Barz for reviewing the change.
• Thanks to Szymon Kłos for fixing a copy/paste issue on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, and thanks to Jan Holesovsky for reviewing the change to make sure everything looks good.

Honorable Mentions

• Thanks to Pedro Silva for doing various improvements on our community page, reviewing pull requests, and sharing his design magic with us, other contributors.
• Thanks to Marco Cecchetti for working on some new surprises -hint: more integrations ;)- for us.
• Thanks to Michael Meeks for chasing, testing, cleaning, and merging various patches.
• Thanks to Thaís Vieira for fixing some color inconsistencies in the UI and working on a new cypress test.
• 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 Gökay Şatır for working on the Calc row and column discrepancy issues.
• Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for improving the related release engineering bit to allow us to have faster release builds for Collabora Online 6.4 series, along with various other tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
• Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
• Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 loves LibreOffice!

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

• Thanks to Gülşah Köse for fixing a crash caused by an invalid language tag, and continuing his work on camera rotation improvements, including adding support for text rotation by camera z and vertical alignment support to camera rotation. Check out her blog post for the details.

  

  Text camera Z support

• Thanks to Gülşah Köse for improving UX by preventing creation of databases in absence of embedded database engines, and also for mentoring 3 university students from her university to work on LibreOffice core. They got their first commits merged! [0][1][2]

• Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving OLE support by resolving an issue which caused embedded objects being uneditable after import to Writer,[0][1] as well as various other improvements and fixes around Smartart and DOCX import, thus resulting in better compatibility with other office suites, as well as making sure only one instance of LibreOffice is opened when two requests for the same file is made without delay.

• Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for various[0][1] fixes and improvements around PDF annotations such as adding the possibility to show highlight annotations.

• Thanks to Muhammet Kara for fixing a bug which caused LibreOffice to crash in case of invalid JSON data received on the new Additions dialog.