September/October KDE PIM summary blog post

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi,

first something not for the blog post, but feel need to mention here to fellow 
PIM devs:
Had started investigations into a range of bugs, but currently stalled there 
due to yet incomplete insight, sorry to all who quickly helped me but then saw 
no further reaction so far. I first need to get finally some of my feature 
needs implemented to enhance my energy/motivation :) But I feel challenged by 
all those bugs and should return at a later point to defeat them finally and 
put them on my virtual trophy wall ;) (not that I mind others sacking them 
before of course).

Here the public things from my desk:

General:
* some porting away from deprecated Qt, KF & PIM libs API
* some clean-up of code of PIM's deprecated API with no more users

EventViews/KOrganizer:
Started on-going work on reviving the calendar decoration feature.
It was added in 2007 (see last section of https://commit-digest.kde.org/
issues/2007-06-17/, respective screenshot https://commit-digest.kde.org/
issues/2007-06-17/files/korganizer_themed_decorations.png), but in the years 
after while staying around suffered from lack of maintenance, having now 
layout issues as well as some plugins badly or not working at all.

The plugin for "Picture of the day" from English Wikipedia has already been 
restored, will be in KDE Gear 21.12: 
MR (landed) -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-addons/-/merge_requests/17
screenshot -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-addons/uploads/
966d16b09dab6ce1a4969ee2a6da75dd/Screenshot_20211014_210315.png

A some years ago started plugin for moon phases has seen more work now and 
hopefully is landing soon in time for KDE Gear 21.12 as well:
MR (draft) -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-addons/-/merge_requests/12
screenshot -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-addons/uploads/
4ef668e4bbf5b5cb9469714d55a99358/Screenshot_20210728_154659.png

The moon phase plugin then triggered on-going work to have calendar decoration 
also shown in the month view:
MR (draft) -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/eventviews/-/merge_requests/46
screenshot -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-addons/uploads/
ff28c7df9db45a14e87680e029a61dca/Screenshot_20211021_010202.png

Restoring and enhancing the calendar decoration feature might turn into a long 
term project. An developing idea for the future would be to make these 
decoration plugins generic enough to also be usable from other calendaring 
solutions, like Plasma calendar widgets or apps like Kalendar. There surely 
are lots of use-cases for all kind of context information or actions users 
might want to have shown or available on their digital calendar to match their 
respective interests & needs. Reusable plugins would help here, e.g. with 
consistency across the products and with no need for reimplementation for each 
individual product.

Cheers
Friedrich