Boosters: Umbrella Sprint Summary

For the last few months some of the Boosters were working on “Umbrella” infrastructure concept for openSUSE. Various web tools grew over time and unfortunately they became almost independant and disconnected from each other. We decided to improve the situation by making openSUSE websites more integrated and easier accesible in order to help people to find the stuff they are looking for.

During the openSUSE Conference 2009 Klaas gave a talk about the current state of tools and our improvement plans. Robert created a brand new Bento theme which allowed Pavol to create a simple global menu to put on top of each website. These menus group all links to other websites into four categories: Downloads, Support, Community and Development. These more-or-less correspond to groups of users openSUSE has, which makes navigation easy and fun!

The Bento theme was later ported to MediaWiki engine by Michal, so we could use it in our new wiki instance, which is being filled in with content at the moment by other Boosters in cooperation with Wiki team.

We were more than happy to accept help from Pascal Bleser who completely remixed Planet openSUSE to visually match the rest of the sites, while delivering lots of other improvements (like keyboard navigation for example).

One of the things that also witnessed the design change was software.opensuse.org, our portal for downloading the last stable and development releases also containing a package search. It now contains a link to openSUSE Derivatives.

Coolo and Tom continued their Build Service efforts from their previous “Factory Page” sprint, which lead to massive web user interface overhaul. You can read about it in the previous separate post by Andreas.

Here are the screenshots of described applications, but remember that it is better to see the pages in action by yourself! :-)

What was left out of the sprint were the Wordpress theme and vBulletin forums theme. The first one is more-or-less ready but is not yet tested. You welcome to help us with these to make the theme transition complete. Robert also created a style guide which is available from our wiki and should help you with using and applying the Bento theme. While it is quite short at the moment, it will be enhanced with nice “How To” documents soon.

This concludes our long but important “Umbrella” sprint and Boosters are already looking forward to other exciting challenges.