[FM Discuss] booki update

[adam hyde]

hey

I just wanted to write a little update about the Wellington Code Sprint
and the current state of Booki.

So, March 11-15 we held a Code Sprint for Booki beta in Wellington (New
Zealand). Douglas organised 2 small little houses in Pukerua Bay right
on the water front (the houses belonged to friends of Douglas).
Attending the sprint were Aco (flying in from Croatia), Douglas (he
lives in Wellington), Laleh Torabi (flying in from Berlin), me (also
from Berlin), Andy Cat (coming in from Sydney), John Curwood (Hamilton,
NZ) and Lisa and Francis (Wellington).

We spent 5 days eating and coding together. The aim was to create a 1.0
beta release. As most people probably know Booki has already been tested
in the real world with the Collaborative Futures sprint (see the FM blog
- http://www.flossmanuals.net/about ) which was early February.

However, we needed to get Booki designed and cleaned up and work out
some things with everyone in the same room. We worked in a bit of a
reverse-intuitive way - we did not have a list of tasks to be completed
that would bring Booki to beta, instead we agreed to make booki usable,
get as much done as possible (from the known tasks) and call that the
beta. So, in anycase we would always get to the beta release ;)

As it happens we got more done than I anticipated. You may have seen the
results already on http://www.booki.cc but if you haven't then take a
peak...you can create accounts and use booki already.

As far as a list of what was implemented during those days, it looks
something like this :
* implemented user status messages
* implemented publishing templates
* cleaned up pdf rendering 
* implemented design 
* cleaned up user interface (mostly navigation)
* cleaned up login process
* created pages for displaying books, users, groups
* created easy_install python packages
* created 'create groups' form
* updated and wrote the user manual
* cleaned up trac (bug reporting / milestone management)
* killed a lot of bugs

there are more little things...you can look at lists of commit messages
if you so desire :
http://booki-dev.flossmanuals.net/git?p=booki.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/sputnik

As a result Booki is quite usable and also quite installable (see
http://booki-dev.flossmanuals.net/git?p=booki.git;a=blob;f=INSTALL;h=9b6d02b2312e60f3b00590d5d1468f3d5b1ff21b;hb=refs/heads/sputnik)

You can also look at the user manual John is putting together :
http://www.booki.cc/booki-dev-guide/info/ (we will clean up the over
sized images in the manual next week).

The biggest issue we have with Booki at the moment is that there is no
widow and orphan control when generating PDF (Widows and Orphans refers
to how headers and sentences are sometimes left 'dangling' ie.
unattached to the following content - it looks ugly).

There are people working on this (its part of webkit which we use for
pdf generation) from Google as it happens, so we hope this will be
resolved in the near future.

So, there are some known bugs in this version of Booki. If you would
like to bug test Booki this would be fantastic. You can create an
account on our site for filing bugs -http://booki-dev.flossmanuals.net ,
log in and click 'new ticket'...enter as much info as you can and file
the report under the milestone 'bugs'. I will write more information
about bug reporting for the user manual in the next weeks...

We are also always looking for people to help with coding. If you would
like to help then look at the tickets :
http://booki-dev.flossmanuals.net/report/3

Get the code installed and then talk to Aco, Doug or me via email
(http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/booki-dev-flossmanuals.net)
or via the irc (server:freenode, channel #fm-tech)

I hope many will want to help... we need as many hands on deck now since
every little bit makes booki better and better...

There is more news about booki - Archive.org want to use it for proofing
scanned books and I will meet with them in a few weeks to discuss this
further. We will also do some Book Sprints to test booki out more and
use the new publishing feature Doug implemented in Wellington to push
books to FLOSS Manuals..i'll post more booki news as it comes... 

big thanks to Doug for organising such a cool place to do the
sprint :))))

adam










-- 
Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals
German mobile : + 49 177 4935122
Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
irc: irc.freenode.net #flossmanuals

"Free manuals for free software"
http://www.flossmanuals.net/about