Re: Future of Quanta

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 20:17, Dr. Robert Marmorstein
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Given the thread about alternatives to Quanta, I wanted to talk to open up a
> discussion about moving Quanta forward.
>
> As I understand it, Quanta is essentially being maintained now by Milian
> Wolff who is involved in many other KDE projects and is a pretty busy guy.
> That means that the project is badly in need of developers to help him out
> and get things back on track.  Even if you have no programming experience,
> there are many ways you can contribute (creating templates, testing, writing
> documentation, submitting bug reports), but the project definitely needs
> more people who can update the C++ code.
true, true.

>
> The decision to switch Quanta 4 to a think skin on top of kdevplatform had
> some interesting consequences for the GUI layout.  It's essentially now an
> entirely different program from Quanta3.  I've tried to submit some patches
> that make it more usable for my HTML design workflow, but I've had
> difficulty understanding the differences between a "file template" and a
> "project template" in the new Quanta.
What do you mean by file template; afaik that doesn't exist.
I use an external script that dynamically generates content.
But it would make sense to have such file templates - as a KDevplatform feature.

> I also looked into porting Quanta 3 directly to Qt4 and KDE4 (under a new
> name), but it relies heavily on several GUI classes that were removed from
> Qt4 and have no direct equivalents.  I will continue this effort, simply
> because I think it's worthwhile just to have an alternative stream of
> development, but I'd also like to help push the ball down the road further
> on the new Quanta.
Ouch - you have to maintain a lot of code. I wouldn't recommend doing
that - tough
people say it was a mistake because quanta4 isn't ready. But that is
not true - the problem
is the lack of developers.

>
> I have very limited time (I have a day job and also contribute to KOffice
> and a few other tools), but I'd like to ask the current Quanta developers to
> take a few minutes and post a list of tasks where they could most use help.
>  I figure there are probably enough on this list with SOME programming
> experience (even if only in PHP) that we can help get development
> kickstarted again.
Areas where help is needed:
- The language plugins need to be polished:
   o html/xml
   o css
- multiple languages per document (milian worked on that - needs
polish and merged)
- javascript language support (quanta3 didn't have that)

those plugins I plan to release standalone:
- upload
- xdebug
- executebrowser


... not *much* is required to get quanta4 back on track. Only
developers doing that :D

Niko