Mozdev.org

The next Mozdev community meeting has been scheduled; we'd appreciate it if you can come by and discuss Mozdev's future.

Friday, Nov 20th
14:00 EST (19:00 UTC)
#mozdev on irc.mozilla.org

The meeting will be logged and will be available here:
http://irc.mozdev.org/logs.html

The agenda is currently very similar to the last meeting's agenda but we will probably spend less time on finances and committee organization:

http://www.mozdev.org/drupal/wiki/Community-Org-Meeting-Agenda-Nov-20

You may want to review the logs from the last meeting for background:

http://irc.mozdev.org/logs/Mozilla/%23mozdev/2009/11/%23mozdev.2009-11-14.log

 

We'd like to have a meeting to discuss the new Mozdev community organization with interested parties. So far the most people seem to be able to meet on Saturday, so I'd like to propose the following time:

Saturday, Nov 14th
11:00 EST (17:00 UTC)
#mozdev on irc.mozilla.org

The meeting will be logged and will be available here:
http://irc.mozdev.org/logs.html

We're still working on an agenda and will post a link to it as soon as we have some more ideas.

In the last 9 years, Mozdev has done a great deal to increase the adoption of Mozilla technologies and promote the goals of the Mozilla project.  We did this primarily by providing hosting and tools to developers. Recently the Mozdev board members have come to the conclusion though that the needs of the community have changed and project hosting is no longer a problem for developers.  A number of free sites (github, Google Code...) do a great job with this and the Mozilla Add-ons site has evolved to become the hub for extension developers.

In light of this, the Mozdev board is seriously considering dismantling the non-profit Mozdev Community Organization that runs the site.  The overhead of running a legal organization is no longer justified and is distracting attention away from the site itself.  We want the site to continue to serve the needs of the community and think that handing things to a new group of people who are passionate about Mozdev is the best way to make this happen.

We need you! First, this does not mean that Mozdev is shutting down. We are looking into creating a community council to replace the board of directors and welcome you to join that group and help shape Mozdev's future.

Once again, we'd like to stress that the goal here is not to shut down the site. We feel it still contains enormous value to our users. But because of logistical issues we need to wind down the non-profit structure and change the organizational nature of Mozdev. To get involved, post a reply here or or send an email to the address listed on the feedback page.

The Mozdev Board.

At long last bug#20841 is coming to a close which means our top 50 projects page has been updated to show all the new stats that we're tracking for our projects.  Want to know who commits the most or has the most active mailing list, now you can!  Along with the updated top 50 page is a new set of RSS feeds so that you can follow any of these lists in any order you want (other than just the top 50 projects by pages as it was previously).

Other than that, Mozilla has deployed our customized fizzypop in their new add-on builder with a tip over to use for the non-Mozilla apps or advanced tasks.  Their add-on builder looks great and we definitely appreciate the link!  They've already made improvements that we need to incorporate.

This week I was able to finish up porting our Bugzilla templates and skin to work with version 3.4 as well as implement graphs for various project stats.

Fixing up our Bugzilla templates was slightly complicated due to moving away from editing the templates directly and putting them into the "custom" directory to override the built-in templates.  The skins needed slight updates to override new styles in 3.4.  Permissions problems caused problems porting the templates as I was unable to view my changes frequently causing slow-downs in testing.

The graphs for project stats are available both for all projects and on a per-project basis on each project's overview page.

Next week I would like to update the top 50 page to pull data from the new stats since this will provide both a rolling 30-day window (instead of a window reset at the 1st of each month) and will also allow new projects to show up for certain stats (we have some projects with large numbers of downloads that don't currently show up - and I'm really interested to see the project with the most commits).

We've been working on improving our project stats gathering and reporting for some time now and have finally added some new graphs showing various metrics (see bug#20841).  The stats we're gathering include web hits, pages, and bandwidth as well as the number of downloads, bugs, VCS commits, and list posts.

Our overall project stats page has been updated to show these stats.  This is a page sumarizing all projects hosted on Mozdev.

What we're most excited about is being able to show these broken down per-project, as on our "www" project overview page:

If there are other stats you would like to see, let us know.  We're hoping these values will help projects better gauge their activity and improve user interaction.

Two things have primarily been worked on this week; project stats and getting our bugzilla templates updated for Bugzilla 3.4.

The biggest thing going on with project stats this week has been bug fixing and backend code to get the data gathered and presented properly.  I've now finally begun frontend work, and you can see that the project overview page now has some more stats about the last 30 days (see www's page for an example).  Next I'd like to add some graphs for the web stats we have as well as VCS commits and list posts (probably not bugs right now).

The bugzilla templates are coming along fine, I just haven't spent too much time tweaking them.  It looks like our CSS will need some work, but it shouldn't be too difficult.

Other minor things include a Drupal upgrade to version 5.20 and addressing some bugs found from error message reports.

This coming week I'd like to finish up the project stats by adding the graphs to the overview page; a site-wide graph of the various stats, and updating the top 50 page to show all the new stats values.  I'd also like to finish up the Bugzilla template updates so we can look into upgrading to 3.4.

I've been busy the past couple weeks and forgot to post a status update.  In the past two weeks I've primarily been working on improving the per-project stats we're gathering in preparation to show them on the project overview page.  Stats we're now tracking per-project are include: web hits, page views, and bandwidth as well as the number of downloads, bugs, list posts, and vcs commits.  This week I hope to get these stats visible on the project overview page and hopefully re-tool some other pages (like the top 50 page) to use more of this data.
Other tasks the past few weeks include:

• bug#21315 - fixing long CVS commit problem after server upgrade
• bug#19617 - announced Project Wizard (sounds like AMO will be getting a similar tool)
• Added support for Songbird Feathers to project wizard
• bug#20841 - started gathering web stats for all projects instead of just top 50.  Also started gathering stats for number of list posts, VCS commits, and bugs.
• Fixed bug in hg log parsing (script wasn't being run w/ proper path)
• Upgrade OpenX ad server
• Upgrading Bugzilla templates for 3.4.x (bug#21711)

We're currently upgrading our bugzilla instance to version 3.0.9 due to some nasty security problems.  Our bugzilla might be down temporarily during this update but the downtime should be minimal.  If you notice any problems afterward, please let us know.
We're also planning on upgrading to bugzilla 3.4.2 in the near future.  If you have any ideas on features you'd like to see that are available in the new version, let us know!

We've received some great responses to our project wizard and have already added support for creating Songbird extensions and feathers, but we need your help to add more.
Some things we'd really like to see in the near future:

• Support for JS Modules instead of recommending XPCOM components
• Support for Jetpack

We'd also really like to see:

• Support for Komodo extensions

And on the "that would be awesome" list:

• Integration with Bespin; go straight from wizard to development

If you think you could help with any of these tasks let us know!

We've been working on helping new projects get off the ground faster by simplifying the mundane parts of creating a new Mozilla project by creating a project wizard (suggestions on a better name that distinguish between a Mozdev and a wizard project are welcome) and it's now ready for your use!

We've been building on the excellent Fizzypop which we learned about at last year's Mozilla Summit in order to make it easier to add new project types (our contributions can be found in our hg fizzypop repository with tracking in bug#505441).  We've already added Songbird extensions to the choices and hope to add Songbird feathers and Komodo extensions in the near future.

New projects are given links to the wizard to get started on their project right away.  Existing projects can select their project and have a template generated for them to get them going in a new direction quickly as well.

If you have any problems or suggestions please let us know or add them to bug#19617.

A week ago I was spending a good bit of time on a non-Mozdev-related project so I didn't post a status update since there was very little work done.

This past week I've been finishing up our project wizard (suggestions on a better name that distinguish between a Mozdev project and a wizard project are welcome) and it's now ready for production.  New projects are given links to the wizard to get started on their project right away.  Existing projects can select their project and have a template generated for them to get them going quickly as well.  We even support Songbird extensions and hope to add Songbird feathers and possibly Komodo extensions in the near future.  If you have any problems feel free to add them to bug#19617.

Besides the project wizard I helped look for problems with our recent server upgrade which seemed to go very smoothly.

This week I'd like to finish adding support for any new project types to the wizard and then I will be looking back to the roadmap for futher ideas.

Our sysadmin team will be taking time this Friday to upgrade our production machine's OS to the latest version in order to continue providing the security and stability that Mozdev users have come to expect.

We expect the downtime to be approximately 1-3 hours starting at 07:00 UTC on Friday the 28th but are scheduling a 6 hour window to be safe.

If you have any questions about the downtime and how it will affect your project, feel free to get in touch with us.

Last week was a slow week as I handled lots of project support requests and had some outside projects on my plate.  Some things that were accomplished include:

• bug#19617 - Fixed zip file creation; some minor display problems
• fixed bug in user overview page which prevented display for some usernames with punctuation (periods, underscores)
• fixed bug in project request form which showed an error for email addresses with a plus in them
• fixed bug in project creation where mail list passwords weren't sent to the project owner
• added project creation time to the project overview page

This week I plan to continue finishing up the project wizard.  Feel free to add your comments to bug#19617 if there's anything you'd like to see.

Last week was spent getting our extension/project wizard (bug#19617) ready and a lot of progress has been made.  It can currently:

• Display a choice for type of project to create (extension, application, or component)
• Display an empty form for each type of project
• Pre-fill data for existing or pending projects
• Re-display a form with error data
• Generate a zip file for the user to download and get started with their work

There seems to be a problem with the zip file generation that I haven't been able to debug yet.  Otherwise it's most polish that needs to happen now and should be finished up very quickly.
Other tasks included:

• Project & mirror support
• bug#21315 - Problems commiting large-ish file to CVS

Next week I'll be on vacation and should resume normal tasks in a week with finishing up this extension wizard.