Entry tags:

weekly announcements

Hello Dreamwidth! We return from a week in Portland for OSCON (more about that in a bit) for the weekly update. I should also announce that a) fu is the most awesome person in the world to meet in person, and b). the gods of airplane travel have screwed up her return trip, so she is here in the US for another unplanned day. Everyone please think good air traffic control thoughts for her to get home tomorrow ...

In the meantime, we bring you this week's update. (And, for those who said two weeks ago that me officially moving the updates to Wednesday would mean that they'd really get posted on Friday, I would like to announce that I totally started this on Wednesday itself. Really. It just took me a bit longer to proofread it than I thought it would.)

Development

You can read last week's code tour, covering July 14 to July 22. (We've gotten a bit out-of-sync with code tour + weekly update, so hopefully next week we'll be able to sync them back up again.) This week we welcome new developer scamper. Highlights of this week's work: many new journal themes, lots of backend cleanup, some new notification types (for instance, the ability to only subscribe to top-level comments in an entry, instead of all comments), and some CSS cleanup to fix display issues in certain journal styles.

As always, none of these fixes are available on the live site just yet; they're still in testing. We're hoping to schedule the next code push soon, possibly tonight. (EDIT: Yup, tonight!) Keep an eye on dw_maintenance for details.

To keep in touch with what's being added, you can track the 'code tour' tag in dw_dev, where changes are explained in "plain English" once a week or thereabouts, or subscribe to changelog_digest, where all changes are wrangled into a daily update containing every commit to our code repository. There's also changelog, for those who want to see everything.

OSCON

The lack of update last week was because we were at OSCON in Portland, OR, speaking on the topic of DW's open source development model. The talk went really well, and we had a lot of people who were very interested in what we've been up to! We also got a chance to go to a lot of other talks about interesting developments in open source (although I had to miss the last day of the conference due to health issues, which was of course when the one talk I really wanted to hear was scheduled, sigh), and I'm hoping some of those talks will be able to inspire some Dreamwidth awesomeness down the road. (We also got to visit Powell's. Mmm, Powell's.)

If you know of a conference that you think we'd be a good match for, let us know!

Suggestions

As anyone who watches our Bugzilla install can tell, last week and this week I have set myself the task of conquering the dw_suggestions backlog. It had been about two months since the last time I moved suggestions from the community to Bugzilla, so I had about a hundred and forty things to handle -- you guys have some great opinions! I'm not completely done yet (there are some suggestions that I want to implement, but haven't thought of the best way to do so yet, so I'm holding off on moving them until I can decide on some more of the implementation notes) but things are looking a lot less chaotic over there.

With this update, we've now accepted 435 suggestions for implementation -- everything from the tiny to the massive -- and have implemented 135 of them, for a 31% implementation rate. If you'd like to browse the "accepted for implementation" suggestions, they're in the bugzilla: migrated tag, and the implemented ones (although again, they might not yet be live on the site) in the bugzilla: implemented tag. And, of course, if you'd like to pick up something and work on it, you can find the unassigned suggestions query in Bugzilla.

Summer of Code

With midterm reviews just past, our Summer of Code students are working hard on their projects. For those who don't remember the list, it is:

anarres, working on business and usage statistics
chiming, working on a RTE overhaul
i_xerxes, working on an iPhone client
jportela, working on the polling system redesign/improvement
mayank, working on a desktop client
panna, working on a built-in calendaring/events system
the_wanlorn, working on a "named guest" commenting level

Things have been going really well so far -- we've already seen some project bits from anarres and jportela in our code review queue, and everybody else has been working hard on their project even if it's not quite the sort of thing you can check in in pieces. I'm really looking forward to the end results on every single one of these projects, and everything I've seen so far tells me that it's going to be awesome.

Style System Documentation

A month or so ago, we put out the call for people who were interested in working on our style system documentation, in order to make the process of customizing the way your journal works more easy to understand. I'm happy to announce that foxfirefey and the dw_styles community have been working hard on improving the docs (and in some cases, creating them from scratch!), to the point where I think even I might understand things now. (It's a running joke that the style system is the one part of DW that I do not understand in the least.)

Anyway, the S2 Guide on the DW wiki is really springing into shape, so if there's something you've been confused about (or if you've been confused about all of it), take a look. Then, if there's something you think should be in there that isn't, you can leave a comment on the last Styles documentation update roundup post. Meanwhile, if you see a way to improve the docs, feel free to leap right in -- that's why it's on the wiki in the first place.

Unused Accounts

We've had a lot of people asking us about our policy in regards to unused accounts lately, so I thought I would clarify it:

* We don't delete accounts for inactivity. Once you register an account, it's yours. Right now, we don't ever plan on this changing, but if we do decide to change it in the future, we'll announce it in dw_news well before we do.

* The only exception to this is if we find that a single user is "squatting" on a huge number of accounts/usernames, without using them, usually with the hopes of selling or trading the usernames in the future. If we find that someone's doing that, we do reserve the right to rename the accounts and free up those usernames for legit use. This doesn't mean that you can't have multiple accounts, just that if we reasonably believe that someone is registering multiple usernames without the intent of using them, just to hold on to the usernames to sell or trade in the future, we may take action. It's pretty rare -- I think we've done it about a dozen times since just after open beta launch, when we find particularly egregious examples -- and we reserve it for particularly egregious examples (one memorable instance had someone registering 150+ accounts), so don't worry that you'll be hit if you have one or two journals you haven't gotten around to putting content into yet.

* If you set your account to 'deleted', we'll hold the data for 30 days to allow you to change your mind and undelete your journal. After that, we'll remove the account and the data from our servers, and the account can no longer be undeleted.

* If you know of a DW account belonging to a friend who has passed away, you can contact us at accounts@dreamwidth.org, or open a support request in the Account Payments category, to let us know. We can set the account to Memorial status so it will be protected in the future.

*

That should do it for us for another week! Next week is fu's turn for the update again, assuming she's able to make it back home. (Think happy travel thoughts!) As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion.

We'll see you next week for our next update.