I'm with the Foundation

Helios and the Download Page

2010-06-04T13:15:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I pushed out a new download page for the Helios Developer Builds.

The overall design goal for this page is to make the downloads page less cluttered while still providing all relevant information to the user. This is the first stage in that process, its not finished, but I think we're close.

If you've got any feedback, comments, or complaints please visit Bug 310525 and tell us about them.

Drupalcon San Francisco

2010-04-29T10:27:00.003-04:00

Recently I had the opportunity to attend Drupalcon San Francisco.

See me? I'm there in the back! Look Closer! There were over 3000 of us at Drupalcon this year, including for a few who got managed to sneak by that big volcano! Even those that didn't make it over rallied together and had there own local Drupalcons all over Europe.

DrupalCon was a really great experience. It really reminded me of attending one of our fabulous EclipseCons. Absolutely everyone was super excited for Drupal, Open Source, and even Eclipse! I met a ton of people who were all using Eclipse for their Drupal Development. I even managed to give away a bunch of Eclipse Install stickers!

Here at the Eclipse Foundation we use Drupal for Eclipse Marketplace, Eclipse Live and the EPP Packaging Site. We chose Drupal when we launched Live because of the community that was swelling. It turns out we bet on the right horse. Drupal 7 when it releases promises to be the best ever, and from my point of view they'll meet that goal and then some.

Viva Open Source! I highly recommend checking out Dries Buytaert's (Drupal's Founder) Keynote - State of Drupal, as well as Tim O'Reilly talking about Open Source in the Cloud Era. If you've got time to spare all the sessions are available to watch on archive.org. I'm sure you'll learn something!

So now that the Eclipse has started drinking the Drupal Kool-aid, lets see if we can get them to chug some of our Eclipse Soda!

Helios is coming!

2010-04-27T11:18:00.005-04:00

Spring has sprung here in Ottawa* and it usually gets my creative juices flowing which is good because April is when we really try to pick up some momentum for our yearly release train.

This years release is named Helios - Wikipedia

"In Greek mythology the sun was personified as Helios"

After many hours of tweaking and playing with layer upon layer in Photoshop, I'm proud to release the Eclipse Helios release page. This is just the first iteration of the concept and I'm sure i'll be tweaking things as we add more content.

Lynn tells me the Blogging Contest will be back, and of course there's our annual Friends of Eclipse push. Remember that Friends get Helios first!

Since I already have your attention, why not grab one of the latest Helios M6 builds and kick the tires a bit, file some bugs and help the release out!

If you have any comments on the page I've created a bug to field your questions / comments / screenshot requests here. Bug 310651

* (Yesterday it was 23 degrees Celsius, and last night we got snow, seriously what's up with that?)

Eclipse Marketplace & the future(tm)

2010-03-03T10:18:00.004-05:00

Over at the Eclipse Marketplace we’ve made some improvements to the site, that I'd like to bring your attention to.

Free Tagging

The first big change you may notice is that we’ve added the ability for anyone to specify their own tags on any listing. You can find the free tagging interface on your listings pages. Feel free to tag your listings with your own tags or ones that have already been used.

The Marketplace Client

So you're working in Eclipse and realize that you need plug-in to do X. Wouldn't it be great to load up a plug-in browser right in Eclipse?

We’ve recently announced the creation of a new project at Eclipse called the Marketplace Client Project (MPC), which will allow users to browse and install listings on Marketplace directly from their Eclipse installation. In order to prepare for this client to launch we’ve added two new fields to the Marketplace solutions listings.

Installable Units
The first new field that we’ve added is to allow you to add a listing of Installable Units for your product. The installable units you provide will need to appear in your content.jar files located on your p2 repository site.

Platforms
The second field that we’ve added is to allow you to specify the platforms your products support. This field will be used to filter out listings that would not otherwise be able to install on the target platform.

Screenshots
You may also notice that when editing your listing there is a new field to provide a screenshot. In the near future we’ll be adding a tab to your listings to display the screenshots.

New Eclipse.org Committers Page

2008-10-21T14:11:00.004-04:00

With the release of the new Eclipse.org homepage we've been in the process of updating the main landing pages that are linked from the homepage (Users / Membership / Committers).

So without further ado here's the working version of the new Committers page. http://www.eclipse.org/committers/

I've hijacked Bug 251104 for further discussions on this page. If you have any feedback, missing links, browser bugs, etc please contribute to the bug discussion.

New Downloads Page for Eclipse!

2008-08-26T14:06:00.002-04:00

If you've been following bug 242019 you'll see that what was once just an idea has now come to fruition!

Just after we launched the Packaging Site I spent a lot of time thinking about how we could make our main Eclipse downloads page be not so "exclusive" or even "mutually exclusive". We were running into an issue where we had so many things we wanted to showcase on the page, but didn't have enough space to give everyone a kick at the can. We have the packages, the member distros, and over 90 projects to display, it can be a bit confusing.

My goal was to make the downloads page display lots of content, and be able to categorize it, and most importantly make it _easier_ to find what users are looking for. I think I've succeeded, i'm sure that we'll be tweaking it and adding new things to the page in the future.

If you've got any thoughts on the page feel free to leave your comments in the bug.

1 Million Downloads!

2008-07-22T10:48:00.004-04:00

Recently I've been working on the Packaging site to update its download counts to be more accurate. I'm proud to say mission accomplished!

The most exciting part of all this is over the past weekend we broke 1 Million Downloads of Ganymede. To be precise the total download count (as of this morning) for all the Packages + The Eclipse Classic Download is 1,168,432

Congratulations, and job well done to the entire Eclipse Community!

*Edit* Apparently my calculator skills failed. Download Count updated!

Eclipse Live is looking for Feedback

2008-01-15T16:03:00.000-05:00

One of my tasks for this quarter is to spend some time working on Eclipse Live to make it easier for you to find the webinars, demos, and podcasts that interest you most.

We're looking for your comments on the site in the format
of a web survey. It's really short (only 4 questions) and will only take a quick second to fill it out to let us know what you want.

I'll be using bug 215400 to track the progress of the Live changes in the coming weeks. So feel free to tag along.

Europa Eye Candy

2007-06-18T15:30:00.001-04:00

Last week Wayne asked me to create him a Europa Wallpaper that he could use in some screencams he's preparing for the release.

So i created a bunch that are based off the great graphic that Roger Dudler contributed in Bug 187575

So without further ado, here's a preview of the wallpaper.

You can grab them from the Friends of Europa page. While your there why not toss the Europa is Coming animation on your blog or site. Spread the word!

At your Service...

2007-02-19T11:44:00.000-05:00

I've been spending a lot of time recently getting one of the new features ready for EPIC. Last year we conducted a survey of the users of EPIC and asked them what some of the things they wanted to see on the site.

The Services Directory is one of those ideas. The goal of this new directory is to give companies a place to list their consulting, and training services on EPIC so they can get there message out to more people.

Before we launch this new directory we'd like to get some data into it, so we're not launching it with an empty data set. If there are any organizations out there interested having their services listed with us here at EPIC drop me a line at support at eclipseplugincentral.com and I'd be more then happy to work with you.

EPIC and the Eclipse Update Manager

2006-12-14T14:40:00.000-05:00

A few months back we (the folks at www.eclipseplugincentral.com) put out a survey asking for feedback on the site and how to make it better.

One of the things people requested was a way to better integrate Update Sites into EPIC. Our first change was to add a field to each plugin listing that would store / display the Update Site URL. Now that we've added that the next logical step is to allow you to import Update Sites into Eclipse.

Currently i've developed a script that will generate an XML file of all the update sites currently listed with EPIC. It can be found at http://sandbox.eclipseplugincentral.net/updatesites.xml if you save this file you can then open the update manager and Import Sites with this file. But that seems not quite useful, more then likely you wont be using all of those plugins.

So what's the solution? Would a page on EPIC that displayed a list and allowed you to put check boxes next to them then generate your own XML file be better? I'm looking to the community to help me develop this feature because in the end its you who will use it! If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, feedback please post to Bug 168108.

Eclipse's 5th Birthday

2006-11-08T10:29:00.000-05:00

So the Ottawa Birthday party went pretty well. Thanks to Lynn for organizing it. Much beer / cake / pizza was had by all!

I've posted some of the pictures i took last night to flickr and tagged them accordingly. If you took some pictures yourself upload them to flickr and tag them with eclipse5 birthday

So Happy Birthday Eclipse, Keep on truckin!

I'm Impressed

2006-10-26T13:03:00.000-04:00

As a web developer I constantly have to struggle with different browsers, IE and FireFox for the most part. But since they both have released new versions I have to say that i'm impressed by what both teams have done.

Internet Explorer 7 was not what i was expecting from Microsoft. They have released a very striped down user experience in a browser that loads quickly. Kudos to the IE7 team, i know that theres still all sorts of discussion about CSS and compatibility, but honestly getting both browsers to behave the same way is a pipe dream. (I'm ready to eat crow should the day arise where this is attained).

FireFox 2 just plain blows my doors off! When I installed it checked which extensions (now called add-ons) could be updated. Then updated them. But the 2 features that really make me giddy are :

Undo Close Tab - I don't know how many times i've closed a tab by accident.
Show Windows and Tabs from Last time - Simply put its like hibernating your browser. Closing your browser saves all the tabs you have open, so that when you open it again they load right back up. But it even saves your history, and contents of edit boxes.

As a web developer I always have 2 applications running at all times. My IDE (Eclipse) and my Web browser. Both IE7 and Fx2 are great products worthy of the upgrades. If things keep up this way I cant wait to see what IE8 and Fx3 have in store for me!

www.eclipse.org - beta version

2006-10-03T10:41:00.000-04:00

Some of you may notice that www.eclipse.org may look a bit different. We'll we've launched the beta version of the website for your feedback. Right now 1/4 views will see the new beta page. Over the next week or so i'll be tweaking the page and slowly upping the amount of pageviews directed at the homepage. At the foundation we've tried to design a page that will give new users a better idea of what Eclipse is and what it can do for them.

To save you all from just refreshing the homepage to see the new one you can view it here.

http://www.eclipse.org/home/index2.php

The New Eclipse.org

2006-09-20T11:49:00.000-04:00

I've posted Bug# 158009 over at our bugzilla, requesting comments / feedback / opinions on the new homepage we've been working on. This version is more focused on users, and we've included things like a big freaking download button (tm) which im sure many of you will be pleased with.

Check out the new page and leave your comments on the bug here.

Pillars of Eclipse : Request for Comment

2006-08-28T13:34:00.000-04:00

I've posted a new bug 155235 about the Pillars of Eclipse pages were currently developing for eclipse.org.

Please give us your feedback on the pages!

Stuck in a Web

2006-08-23T10:59:00.000-04:00

That's pretty much how I feel right now, stuck in a web of well, websites. That's not to say i'm not enjoying it! I am a web designer. One of the things that seem to keep popping up recently are issues with the Phoenix project and the CSS for the Phoenix skin. The skin and design are now almost year old and I think they're in dire need of some refactoring. There’s a variety of bugs that have been logged that either can't be fixed because of sheer technical issues, or can be fixed but have possible repercussions to other parts of the website. And then there are bugs that can be fixed by thinking outside of the box.

But a lot of these issues I think could be solved by creating a CSS Style Guide. By adding something like this to the Phoenix documentation I think it would save a lot of hacking at Phoenix by the projects to get things to display and work they way they want. On the other side of the argument are we at the point now where we need to develop Phoenix Skin V2, and try to eliminate a lot of these problems by spending more time analyzing what the projects use for their sites and tailoring the design to them.

The Countdown is on!

2006-06-22T14:58:00.000-04:00

We've Relauched the Callisto Landing page on eclipse.org. You can check it out here.
It's great to see how a community can come together and produce this kind of event. I for one will be watching feverishly as the countdown ticks down to 0.

Thanks goes out to Tim Wagner for suggesting that we put a countdown timer on the web site.

Friends of Callisto

2006-05-24T14:18:00.000-04:00

We've just launched the new Callisto section of the eclipse website. If you want to help get the word out on Callisto we've included the Friends of Callisto Website that contains a few images that you can place on your website. Check it out!

EclipsePluginCentral, if you love something set it open-source (free).

2006-05-19T10:34:00.000-04:00

That precisely what the EPIC Alliance (Genuitec, Instantiations and Innoopract) did with their EPIC portal. They made a bold decision to donate the code to the foundation so that we can expand on a great idea and give it back to the community. This is your website.

So you may be asking what was involved with the move. Well first we had to get all the legal stuff out of the way (I won't bore you with the details). But mainly it was to take an existing code base run on their servers and move it to ours. Easy you say, well I call shenanigans! EPIC is not a simple website. It's build on PostNuke and has been highly customized to suit EPIC needs. Modifications to the code had to be made of course to rebrand it and add other features such as reconfirmation of the foundation's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, not to mention the nitty gritty backend stuff that i've tweaked to make it easier for admins to manage the content of the site.

That being said I'm proud to say that EPIC has been running on the foundation's server for a week today. What does that mean? Well i'm not sure exactly, it hasn't crashed and brought the whole cluster down which i'm sure Denis is happy about. There have been glitches sure but did you notice them? At least I hope you didn't :) As for metrics the site is averaging 21,000 hits a day from 2400 unique visitors. Total count for unique visitors is almost 22,000! Since i don't have the metric from the Alliance i can only hope that this is a sign of the traffic that we can expect.

So what does the foundation want you to get out of EPIC? Well information really, our hope here is that you will be able to find any Eclipse plugin out there. Our hope is that EPIC is a place that you can use to discuss these plugins and a place that you can "start the conversation". That being said theres also a section for RCP apps so post them to!

"I was happy with EPIC before, how will the foundation make it better?" - How about making the entire site open source? Did you notice a bug on the site thats driving you nuts. Contribute some code and I personally guarantee that it will make its way onto the site much quicker <g>. EPIC is a component of the Phoenix project at the foundation. And will be run in much the same way as other projects. Bugzilla is now up an running for users to submit bugs at. The code will be in CVS soon enough.

Roadmap to the future - For the next few weeks i wouldn't expect EPIC to have sweeping changes and massive upgrades. (I've got other work to do :D). What we need to do now is let EPIC settle for a bit. But you can expect new features and upgrades to come.

If you've got feedback or suggestions, or cookies :) send them to me!

eclipse.org needs your help!

2006-04-12T14:49:00.000-04:00

I've posted Bug 136420 looking for feedback on a new design and layout for the eclipse / community page. My goal here is to get feedback on what you would want to see here. Tell me what you like, and more importantly what you don't like.

For those of you too lazy to check out the bug to get the link for the new design try here.

EclipseCon Gears Up

2006-03-20T10:48:00.000-05:00

Welcome all to EclipseCon,

I had a great time at the blogging party last night, being the new guy there were a lot of new faces, but its nice to see such a thriving community.
I'll be spending some of the next few days wandering around the conference stopping random people and asking them about the eclipse.org website and i plan to run a BoF on the website as well. I'll keep this short so the aggregator keeps running!

Being the New Guy

2006-03-03T10:48:00.000-05:00

I'd like to say a big hello to the Eclipse Community. So Here goes!
HelloWorld ("Eclipse");

I've recently joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Web Designer. I've been creating websites using PHP/SQL for about 6 years, and playing with Photoshop since I was a wee lad.

The guys here at the foundation have made it really easy for me these first 2 weeks. It has been very easy to be the new guy! One of the things that enticed me into working for the Foundation was the massive community that it has built for itself. Its nice to see a project like Eclipse out there that is shaped and developed by the people that use it. Driving it to be better and better every given day.

My mandate in the coming weeks is to take the community site and give it back to you the community. My hope here is to make the site more user friendly and also user driven. So the developers of the many plugins and RCP applications out there can add there products to the site, and modify it with little to no work for either them or us.

With that in mind if you got any thoughts, comments or concerns regarding the community site. Shoot me an email.

First Day

2006-02-20T16:37:00.000-05:00

First day has gone by fast, there's alot to get used to. I got Eclipse installed with PHPEclipse and WTP 0.7 after a couple hours. But im busy disecting the existing code to bring myself up to speed.

First Post

2006-02-20T09:15:00.000-05:00

This is the first post on the blog, its not exciting but were you expecting it to be?