I just uploaded a kind of whitepaper I created some days ago into kdenonbeta/kdeshare/IDEA Feel free to comment on it :-) KDESHARE - aka the "Get New Hot Stuff Button" aka "Hot Stuff" ### I. Motivation ============= Since it came into existance the website http://www.kdelook.org has: - provided people with a place where people can look for artwork and themes for KDE. - created a large community of KDE artists, contributors and supporters/users of KDE related artwork. - thereby improved the quality & quantity of KDE related artwork beyond expectations. Unfortunately most people still don't know about http://www.kde-look.org. Most probably don't know about http://www.kde.org and some even don't know about things like files & folders. To improve this situation on a more general level we'd like to introduce "kdeshare". II. Basic Concept ================= Anybody can register his service at the central server share.kde.org. Examples for such services would be: wallpapers, kwd-templates, themes, mp3-files etc.. Basically it could be everything that you can create using a KDE application. By registering the Name, URL and the mimetypes of the service are added to the service list hosted on share.kde.org. Every KDE application has got a "Hot-Stuff-Button". Once the User clicks on the button KDE connects to share.kde.org and searches the service list for the respective service(s) that exist for the application. If such a service exists the user gets a hot list dialog which shows the top ten "highest rated", "most recent", "most downloaded" items. The User can select each item, get more information on it and install the item on his HDD. III. Details ============ Registering Services -------------------- Before a new service provider can be registered at share.kde.org it has got to be certified as a thrustworthy. The following things need to be checked: - the person who wants to register the service should be the same person that is specified in the whois-information of the respective URL of the service provider webpage. Otherwise the person who owns the URL needs to send us a permission which states that the service provider is thrustworthy. RDF/XML-Stream -------------- The RDF/XML-Stream must contain Name, Description, FileSize and the License for each item. If there is no approved license given then the item doesn't get shown. Keeping the traffic low ----------------------- We have to make sure that the traffic stays low for share.kde.org as well as for the service providers. To make that happen the service providers upload their hotlist-items (rdf-feed, full data for the download items etc.) to share.kde.org. share.kde.org provides the stuff to its users via the mirrors of share.kde.org. To reduce the traffic that is generated by the periodical checking of the rdf-feed and the service list one might want to introduce timestamps. The User Interface ------------------ The User can access the "Hot Stuff" by a) choosing the "Hot Stuff"-button in the toolbar of an application or by choosing it from the menu. The "Hot Stuff" button will only appear in the toolbar - if the service has been mentioned in a default-service-list which has been shipped together with the respective KDE version. - if the service appeared in the service list that was downloaded last time the user made use of the "Hot Stuff"-button. Although this makes the Hot-Stuff-Button appear quite dynamically (which is quite controversial in terms of UI-Design) it prevents the situation where all applications have hot stuff buttons and the user stops clicking on them after he tried some and got no useful result ("no services registered for this application yet"). b) in the sidetree of the KFileDialog there should be an item "Hot Stuff". Clicking on it should result in showing the respective dialog embedded into KFileDialog. Some applications support more than one mimetype. For these applications the Hot Stuff dialog should show a combobox at the top which lists all available mimetypes and defaults to the one which might make most sense (depending on being most popular, depending on the context the hot stuff button was used, etc.) The actual hotlist is being viewed in an HTML-Widget. This has the advantage that one can update the structure and the layout and remove (conceptual) bugs easily later. The actual layout and design is set by files which are defined by the KDE project. The content/data is provided by the service providers. The Hotlist should contain: "Name, Description, Filesize" An additional "More"-Button next to each item would start konqueror and would show the respective service provider webpage including a more detailed description, comments etc. The hotlist is compiled on share.kde.org. So if there are multiple service providers then share.kde.org can merge their items according to a well-defined algorithm (as the algorithm is specified on the server and not on each client one could easily change it later if required) . By pressing the "download"/"install" button the respective item is downloaded and installed automatically. Uploading/Contributing back --------------------------- To prevent that people upload low-quality content we have decided against a wizard/dialog driven "Publish to Internet" menu item for now. If you click on "Publish to Internet" then you should get a dialog which - says that for now you can upload content by visiting the websites of the service providers - and which lists the service providers which come into account. Clicking on the items in the list results in starting up konqueror and showing the respective URL of the service provider. The user has got to find out himself about registering, possible previous art etc. We agreed that this would probably keep the quality of the submissions high enough. On Thursday 20 June 2002 10:35, David Faure wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On Thursday 20 June 2002 12:20, Joseph Wenninger wrote: > > Hi > > > > On Wednesday 19 June 2002 23:20, Cornelius Schumacher wrote: > > > I have implemented a "get hot new stuff" button (well in fact it's a > > > menu entry) for KOrganizer. The code is fairly general and could > > > probably easily be extended to other apps. It's in > > > kdepim/korganizer/knewstuff. > > > > > > Some things are still missing: > > > - Remember what already has been installed. > > > - UI to select the language of the stuff to be installed. > > > - A bit of server infratructure for uploading stuff (i.e. something > > > like an ftp upload area and a way to collect and move the uploaded > > > stuff to the download area). > > > - A customizable way to preview stuff before download. > > > - DTDs for the XML files used for provider list and the meta > > > information about the new stuff. > > > > > > But the basic functionality for choosing, downloading and uploading is > > > there. Before I proceed I would like to ask what you think about it and > > > how it goes together with the other efforts to implement this kind of > > > functionality. > > > > I have something similiar in kate for downloading additional highlighting > > descriptions. > > So there are 2 (or 3?) different implementations of the same thing, > with duplicated code in the apps having this feature and nothing > available in kdelibs? Sounds good.... :{ > > - -- > David FAURE, david@mandrakesoft.com, faure@kde.org > http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~david/ > Contributing to: http://www.konqueror.org/, http://www.koffice.org/ > KOffice-1.2-beta2 is coming very shortly... > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) > Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org > > iD8DBQE9EZPK72KcVAmwbhARAmSPAJ4iXV0+vK835LCqvzBcqCxvPcAATQCfQyfX > dNb4bDVSTqfOftTt6yTqAII= > =WVu+ > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Dipl.-Phys. Torsten Rahn KDE - Conquer Your Desktop! http://www.kde.org