Collabora Online Community – our next major release was made more fun and beautiful by the community

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Really soon (update: released!) there will be the final CODE 21.11! And we really love to let you know about all the people that did the hard work alongside us that made this release possible and fun!

Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release, and accounts for the overwhelming volume of contributions. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice technology, you can check out LibreOffice community credits. We cannot thank everyone involved enough for their passionate work. All of our code is open source, and available to the public on GitHub. Would you like to be part of the Collabora Online success story? Check the new website for Online with information, easy hacks and a forum for Online, report issues, and participate today!

On the community front people have been busy, hacking directly in the code and on the UI, helping with translations and improving the community website. Happily we can report successful Hacktoberfests (both last year and this) were a success with newcomers joining in our weekly Hacktoberfest meetings that were preceding our regular community weekly meetings. Those contributions kept raining down during the next weeks, month and make it into this release.

A huge thanks to Gleb Popov (arrowd) for single-handedly ported Collabora Online to FreeBSD. Oh, arrowd also found time to add and setup FreeBSD’s CI Cirrus. You rock!

Thanks to Andreas Kainz for all the many contributions around UI fixes. For all the improvements on Mobile toolbars and Desktop controls. For working on the Notebookbar spec and also for finding time to start helping newcomers :).

Alexandru Vlăduţu (1&1) has been busy making some user flows more discoverable by adding menubar shortcuts and by improving how the user edits an URL via the hyperlink dialog. Alexandru also made it easier to test and switch between multiple documents by creating a demo exactly for that browser/html/multidocs.html.

Now the avatar list is at the top right of the header thanks to Luka Trovic (Nextcloud) and Julius Härtl (Nextcloud) that also has improved the idle document dialog with new style.

Now branding theme is set as dynamic instead of constant string thanks to Julius Härtl. Who has also hacked and fixed CSP header by removing duplicated img-src rules; added the possibility to pass UI default to documents of type drawing and improved menu hide animation in the Classic UI mode.

Thanks to Stavros Kois for fixing a bug where clicking Page... button in Calc (using the Notebookbar mode) would do nothing, and also for working in the follow ups.

With regards to Docker and for those cases when only something in start-collabora-online.sh has changed the docker build was speeded up by moving the add script after the install script, thanks to Erik Habicht. Still related to docker thanks to Marco Marinello for setting the source of dockerfile to Debian Buster to keep things up-to-date.

Thanks to Gabriel Masei (1&amp1) a different UI mode is allowed for different views, this means that the same document can be viewed at the same time by one user: A using the notebookbar mode and by another user: B using the classic mode. To further his work, Gabriel also added support for that to be changed dynamically via post-message and without re-loading the opened view.

On the admin from Gabriel added clean-up metrics regarding resource consuming documents and also added support for lost kits clean-up.

Thank you to Hugo Peixoto for tackling many of those easy hacks related to optimizing startsWith calls on StringVector elements and for removing unused includes (c++). It’s really cool to see how fast you went with your contributions in such a short period of time!

Switching slide format via the dropdown is now possible thanks to the JavaScript bug fix from Alexandru Vlăduţu.

Martin Hoffman‘s first contribution fixed the build.sh bash script that was wrongly deploying core underneath poco’s directory resulting errors later on when doing configure --with-lo-path

Many upstream icons have been updated thanks to Rizal Muttaqi’s contributions. Thanks to Çağrı Gökçe and umutbayramoglu other new icons have been added to mobile and desktop.

New unit test added for skipping ModifiedStatus from deduplication by Gabriel Masei.

The building process was streamed lined with all the occurrences of WebDAVStorage removed by Yunus Bulut. Still in the process of clean-up, this time in the C++ realm, obsolete locking pieces were detected and removed by Shubham Goyal and duplicated include removed by Andrea Gelmini. Many unused variables and duplicated statements were also removed from Python and JavaScript files, thanks to umutbayramoglu and Bayram Çiçek. PelinkKuran was then hunting and fixing all the problems with indentations as per eslint 4.0.0

Functions in JavaScript are not better declared with less repetition and more consistency thanks to Kandarp Patel.

Lastly, text in many places has been improved, typos have been fixed throughout the code by the hand of Andrea Gelmini; Comments have been added directly into code by the hands of Serkan Danışan. Siddharth and codewithvk.

See all of them bellow:

Thanks to all translators Weblate contributions also kept coming with added missing strings left and right:

This release also marks the very first community smoke test, annouced in many places:

Lastly, we also received many improvements from newcomers to the Community website, CollaboraOnline.github.io