Project Dashboards

[Milian Wolff]

Hello guys!

I really like the ideas Cornelius came up with when working on his KDE 
SDK. He made the choice to patch Qt Creator, but imo his ideas are too 
good not to be used for KDevelop as well.

Basically I think we should revise our ideas about the KDevelop splash 
screen. It is a nice-to-have thing for a first impression. Especially 
newcomers might be helped with getting started.

But for "us", e.g. people who use KDevelop regularly I think Cornelius' 
ideas would be more helpful. I imagine a project-dashboard. When I hack 
on something with others I might want to know what they did:

- recent commits with commit message. diffs just a click away, nicly 
integrated kompare part or similar
- communication:
   * commit review (i.e. display discussion in kde-commits archive)
   * recent discussion on mailing list (again: just display archive). 
Also a way to get to the registration site for the mailing list.
   * maybe even a list of contributors to the project with ways to 
contact them, I imagine:
     - mail adress (on hit => fav mail prog)
     - any kind of IM (on hit => fav mail prog)
     - IRC nick (on hit => fire up fav IRC prog, connect to server [if 
not already there] and query the user, or join channel and write there...)
- social aspect:
   * opendesktop integration, esp. kde-apps
     - rating
     - comments
     - ...
   * reviewboard integration

I think this would be a great feature. Want to contribute to project 
XYZ? No problem, just check it out and it's description file (like the 
XML file Cornelius talks about) gives you all information to populate 
the dashboard. No need to search for the mailing list, no need to setup 
commit-filter. Looking for help just contact a devel via IM or similar. 
And especially commit reviewing could be made much easier this way. 
Looking at diffs in Kmail is OK but having it in Kompare with the 
original sources just a few clicks away is kick-ass imo :) Especially 
with a simple way to apply the patch, then build the project etc. etc...

And to clarify: The dashboard should mostly just open external apps like 
KMail/Kopete/... or integrate KParts like Kompare. Most of the stuff 
above shouldn't be too hard to implement.

The page should be shown in the main-content area (as a tab) when 
opening the project. You can close it if you want to. To reopen e.g. 
"open" the root item of the project in project-view or have a "toggle 
dashboard" menu entry in project group.

What do you think?

-- 
Milian Wolff
http://milianw.de