It’s the final week of Google Summer of Code and I can’t believe how quickly these past few months have gone by. I am glad to share that all the functionality that we initially planned for my GSoC coding period is now complete and all that is left is to test the projects.
Improvements to Season of KDE
As the second part of my project, I have been working on making imoprovements to the Season of KDE website. I have worked on adding many new features which I believe would be very helpful to future participants.
Markdown Support
Earlier, the SoK website only supported simple text input for student’s proposals. This meant that the proposals could not be formatted apart from just spaces and line breaks. The new markdown support allows for students to have detailed proposals with proper formatting. Moreover, they can add images to their proposals too.
Feedback for proposals
Another problem with the previous site was that there was no way for the mentors or admins to provide feedback to the students about their proposals. This led to mentors not being able to help improve the proposal for students and the students being unable to clarify their approach. The new website aims to fix this issue using a dedicated comments section for each proposal. The comments are stored in a tree like structure using Doctrine tree extension. This helps in adding the functionality of replies to each comment. The main comment acts as the parent and the replies as the children. There is also the possibility of hiding some comments from the students in order to keep the discussion private between the mentors and the admins.
Certificate Generation
The students from Season of KDE 2020 including me have not yet received the certificate fo completion for the program. This was caused by the unforseen pandemic this year and some other reasons. This feature allows the students to directly download their certificates from the website upon successful completion of their projects. Moreover this also creates a verification link for anyone to verify the validity of a certificate.
Since we hadn’t receive the certificate yet, I created a very basic template to test the functionality but it can be easily updated to the final design when we receive it.
Other Improvements
There were many other imporvements including UI imporvements and bug fixes.
After GSoC
Although GSoC is now almost over, I will continue to work on these projects to fix any issues and on other KDE projects too :)
About my Project
The project involves improving KDE Web Infrastructure. KDE has a lot of websites and some of them like the main website could use an update.
The first part of the project involves porting kde.org to use Hugo- A go based static site generator. kde.org is very old and thus contains a lot of pages. This project would involve porting most of the pages to markdown so as to make the website faster and easier to develop.
The second part of the project involves updating Season of KDE website. The goal is to use more modern tooling and add some new features. This project is a part of the transition of KDE websites from LDAP to OAuth based authentication. OAuth is a much more modern approach to authentication and would solve some headaches with the current authentication system.
Current Working Repository: Season of KDE
If you would to join in, Say Hi at #kde-www on irc or telegram.