Marco Steinhäuser

More or less spontaneously, I decided to go to “Chemnitzer Linux-Tage” for the first time, the probably second biggest Linux event in Germany, and was really surprised: Not only Linux geeks but a very mixed up audience of Germans and Non-Germans, developers, administrators and interested people in any kind of open source software found together in a very familiar and comfortable atmosphere.

In my role as OXID Community Guide I usually go to such events to talk to owners of interesting projects and maybe find synergies and a surplus for the OXID community. The entry fee at € 5.- was more than reasonable and to be honest: I found more valuable contacts there than on my CeBIT visit a couple of days before.

Of course, I visited the booth of my favorite Linux distribution run by the guys of Ubuntu Deutschland e.V. and furthermore, the Communtu project. Communtu is a Ubuntu based Linux distribution that lets you choose which application projects to install but most interesting is the backup feature: When you have to refresh your installation (what may happen from time to time), you are able to store your complete configuration to the Communtu server and moreover, download a CD or DVD for your new installation without loosing any application.

Also the PIM and CRM project tine 2.0 is absolutely worth mentioning. Tine is based on the Zend Framework and makes extensive use of the JavaScript library jQuery. The project is still young, doesn’t provide that many features that you would expect and really took me some time to install it today. But from it’s approach, it is very promising and the code looks clear on a first glance.

YaCy is a Java based search engine software that I hope to get evaluated for use on oxid-esales.com as well as on OXIDforge as a replacement for the Google search service we implemented presently.

After listening to two talks about IT management and OTRS (Open Ticket Request System) I hooked up with the OTRS guys Shawn and Martin and apparently it turned really, really, really interesting. We use this Perl-based software very successfully in our support department and our installation needs to be adapted for our needs. Shawn is the new OTRS Community Manager and Martin actually the inventor of the OTRS system. Hope to collaborate very tightly with this guys in the future.

For the next year, I personally would really like to have an OXID booth at the “Chemitzer Linux-Tage”. Let’s see whether we can sort it out.

Some days ago, I accidentally found the Russian search engine Yandex and encountered some online stores based on OXID eShop Community Edition in Russian language while exploring it. I contacted three store owners in Russian (yep, I did learn Russian, but didn’t use it for a long time) and asked if they would like to contribute their language files for community use. I got immediate answers from two of them

Konstantin and Vadim gladly sent to me the Russian translation for the OXID eShop front end as well as for the administration area. Both files have been published on the language site of OXIDforge. Feel free to use them in your own online shop instance.

To be honest, I am pretty glad we have Russian now for several reasons. Firstly, I believe Russia (and former member states of the Soviet Republic) are a huge and growing business region in ecommerce. Hence it would be great to grow an even larger Russian OXID eShop community and attract more developers. Last not least, it’s a great opportunity for me to practice my rusty Russian in the forums

Константин и Вадим – спосибо большое, вы молодцы!

The past few days, dev.oxidforge.org thingy was launched. We are still looking for a proper name for it (vote at http://www.oxid-esales.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3401, need to be logged in as a community member!).

Now “OXID developer network – ODN” is about to win that race and I personally like it very much. I already requested an additional subdomain like odn.oxidforge.org for it.

Like Ralf posted today to our corporate blog, a separate user was introduced for that kind of stuff called OXIDlab “… where we publish prototypes or test implementations, which are prepared by our teams. These results of our daily work are very often the first steps to new features for our products … ” like he says. He already uploaded the first finished extension, “SuperClix Export“, to OXID eXchange – the module market place.

Well, and I am still hassling around with that bl**dy SVN+SSH write access to the projects SCM sites on http://dev.oxidforge.org. Reading SVN works properly as committing is followed by an error message like “Authorization refused”. Will get it fixed by the next week, promised!

Tomorrow morning I will officially and proudly announce our collaboration and development platform available at http://dev.oxidforge.org. The software basis is FusionForge, a GForge fork. This platform seems to be ideal for team-work on committing code, language extensions, localizations, themes and much more.

There is just one thing we are still suffering from: How the heck shall we call that baby?
Of course, “collaboration and development platform” or even the URL name is much too long while “dev” is too short and not very meaningful. How about something like “developer zone” or “com-zone”? The word “forge” is already occupied by the whole OXIDforge thing including download pages and so on.

Let me know about your ideas.