Mozdev.org

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.

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.

I've recently been working on getting FizzyPop ready to be included in our project request process (bug#19617).  I should be able to create a "simpler" frontend for Mozdev now that has a lot of the normal required fields (like project name, author, contributors, etc) already filled out.  The primary thing we need to figure out is where it best fits in our signup process.  The current process is typically:

1. Submit project request
2. Confirm email address
3. Wait for admin approval

We'd like to get people working on their projects a little sooner and hopefully lead to more active projects.  I'm thinking we should offer the wizard as soon as you finish the project request so you can download a package to work on.  Another choice would be to submit this template project to their CVS as soon as the project is approved.  This would add delay before you could start working on the project, though.
What do others think?  Would it be better to give the user something to do immediately, or have a more functional CVS tree waiting for them when the project is approved?

While we were primarily focused on improving our wiki, we also got a big improvement to editing blogs and forum posts as well.  We've added FCKeditor to our drupal install and updated all our wikis to use HTML formatting by default while still allowing quick linking between articles through the use of [[Square Brackets]].

A few notable changes/improvements: 

• CamelCase words are no longer linked.  You must link via [[Square Brackets]] to pages
• Table of Contents are added via an HTML comment: <!--tableofcontents-->
• Geshi code highlighting is only supported by editing the source and adding a <blockquote> tag

We hope this drastically improves the usability of our wikis and the rest of the Drupal-based tools.  Let us know if you run into any bugs.

Our Drupal installation has been upgraded to version 5.19 to address a security vulnerability. Let us know if you encounter any problems.

I've been working on bug#18975 trying to make wiki editing easier. Our interpretation of that is:

1. using HTML for markup instead of "wiki syntax" (ie, not Mediawiki, the Text_Wiki syntax we were using, or Mindtouch wiki that MDC switched to)
2. Add a featureful WYSIWYG editor to make editing HTML content easier
3. Maintain an easy way for linking to other pages

Our progress on this can be found on our dev server; an example page is here:
http://www.vebzom.org/drupal/wiki/MozdevDocs

A snapshot of data was made today and most projects' wikis were upgraded on our dev server. Please check it out and let us know what's broken or you like/don't like.

A few notable changes/improvements:

• CamelCase words are no longer linked. You must link via [[Square Brackets]] to pages
• Table of Contents are added via an HTML comment: <!--tableofcontents-->
• Geshi code highlighting is only supported by editing the source and adding a <blockquote> tag

That's all I can think of right now; let us know what you think!

Mozdev has added download graphs to all project pages. This should give project owners a better idea of how frequently users are downloading their projects' files.

We have also added graphs for both downloads and bytes transferred for our mirrors and regions.

If you have any suggestions for improvements to the graphs, feel free to add them to bug#20841. In the mean time, go check out your downloads!

Ever since released our file release system (including secure updates and installations of .xpi files) we've planned on improving the support of hashes. We didn't originally realize that md5 was no longer on the list of hashes, and with sha1 having its own share of problems recently, the need for stronger hashes was increased.

So finally we have dropped support for md5 as well and support only the stronger hash mechanisms (sha1, sha256, sha384, and sha512). We still auto-detect the hash type by the length of the hash submitted in the file management tool, so the procedure is exactly the same. Any existing md5 hashes are still in our system and presented by our secure install links but are considered deprecated.

One of the primary goals of Mozdev recently has been to make using our services easier. We recognize that using CVS for everything can be quite a burden, and we've been planning on addressing this for some time. One thing we feel could help new projects get off the ground faster is to remove the burden of using CVS for managing their web site.

Our edit-in-place implementation tries to stay out of the user's way as much as possible. Once you're logged in to your project, hovering over certain regions highlights them to mark that they're editable. We're using mozile for our editing component along with a custom saving plugin to save each region independently and commit it to CVS. We also have custom commands for uploading images and adding new pages to your project.

This still needs some testing, so if you're interested in trying this out for your project, let us know. You'll need to be using the standard Mozdev theme and should be be using only static content in your web pages (any dynamic content in the pages will be removed when the changes are saved).

We've upgraded our Mercurial installation to version 1.1.2 in order to take advantage of the new graph display. Having the graph display available makes it much easier to track large or small merges and gives you a great visual to know when certain features landed. Check it out on your existing project, or ask us to set you up with hg support

I've been working on bug#19757 and bug#19258 to provide some more member information and protect our users' emails a little better.

To that end we now have a user overview page that shows what projects a user is a member of, when they last committed, and how to contact the user; for example: my user page.

Our project overview pages have also been updated to contain a member list with links to the user overview page so it's easier for people to find out what other projects someone works on. Example of our www project.

And finally the pre-existing member page has been updated so the username links to the user overview page as well (www project again).

Feel free to send any comments about the new features/changes my way.

We're happy to announce the availability of Mercurial for hosting project sources at Mozdev.

Documentation can be found here:
http://www.mozdev.org/drupal/wiki/MozdevMercurial

The biggest caveats:

• CVS is still necessary for maintaining the website and downloads (fixing this is on our roadmap)
• Projects' source information page needs updated by the PO to include information on Mercurial
• We weren't planning on removing the old sources from CVS and we don't have a mechanism for locking CVS, so it might slightly confusing to new users or contributors as to where to get the canonical source for a project if they switch to from CVS to Mercurial

If you're interested in having Mercurial setup for your project, head over to the documentation page and click the link to request a new Mercurial repository.

Mozdev's project overview pages are now live and feature secure installations using InstallTrigger.

Right now we don't have the download graph or the project stats in place, but the main functionality is there:

• Project name and description
• Project tags - projects are tagged with supported applications automatically
• Links to project tools
• Project activity
• Project extensions and downloads with InstallTrigger links

We're really excited to have this type of page in place that gives a nice overview of a project and available tools as well as providing everyone a way to install extensions securely.

Reactions to our project overview mockup were very favorable, and I've made good progress this week getting the page setup and much more functional.

Here you can see our very own 'www' project's overview page:

As you can easily see, we don't have the download graphs or project stats up there yet, but the other information is all available.

Here's a screen shot of the cdn project's overview page:

In this one you can see that they have a number of extensions, and the Link Widget extension even has a release (version 1.6). This is a link directly to an InstallTrigger() call in order to install the extension securely (the links are all served from an SSL site).

Since the Link Widgets extension has a release, you can see it as the latest release on the Flock extension list: