Re-Launching OpenNTF Snippets

Paul Withers | 2 weeks ago | Comments
In time for IBM Think's Community Day, we're relaunching our snippets site.

If you haven't noticed, things have been changing as OpenNTF has more explicitly embraced a wider community. Yes, we've always covered all of what has been IBM Collaboration Solutions / HCL Collaboration Workflow Platforms. But those outside Domino development have been more of a peripheral audience. That has never been a deliberate or conscious decision, but our core output - "projects" - have generally been developer-related (although Easy Admin Tools from Paul Brigden is a welcome and notable exception recently). XSnippets was developed as a replacement for the old code bin, but was again focused on developers. And OpenCode4Connections was also aimed, primarily, at developer-related extensions to Connections.

Well, with the latest update to our snippets site, we're more explicitly addressing that.

Firstly, we're renaming the site OpenNTF Snippets. That's a natural step considering the focus of content is significantly more than XPages and to make the site more notably OpenNTF. And secondly, the list of languages has significantly expanded. These are grouped into specific areas:
- XPages
- Notes Client / generic development
- JavaScript development
- DQL
- Admin scripts
- ICEC
- Connections Customizer

We've also made a complete overhaul of the UI / UX:
- We've modernised the look and feel to Bootstrap 3
- User interface has also included some styling on the buttons taken from non-ICS development frameworks - primary, friendly and danger button styles
- In terms of user experience, we've changed from views to multi-faceted search based on key criteria - language, author and generic free text search. The aim is that this allows quick filtering down to a handful of results
- The login area has also been updated including the ability to register and reset password from the login screen
- The "Create Snippet" button has been hidden behind the login area
- Some outdated links have been updated
- Social sharing has been added (thanks Serdar for adding this)

Hopefully you'll agree this is more modern, more fit for the future and hopefully it will give developers ideas to give users a better user experience.

Request for CollaborationToday Curators

Paul Withers | 1 month ago | Comments
CollaborationToday has become a key place to stay updated on all ICS platforms. In an exciting year for Domino, Connections and Portal we would like to expand the small team currently curating blog posts. We want to make sure posts are specifically relevant to our community and provide best value to those using the site. The effort required is minimal, reviewing and creating an entry with brief details and publishing. So if you're interested in helping out, please contact Oliver Busse or one of the other board members via social media or via the OpenNTF Slack channels.

Part of the improvements we made last year to minimise the effort required was auto-tweeting of content posted there to the CollaborationToday Twitter Stream. Those stopped running for a while, but have been re-enabled now. These pick up RSS feeds for particular areas of focus, so if you want to stay updated on specific areas via a feed reader, you can use URLs in the format of https://collaborationtoday.info/ct.nsf/feed.xsp?filter=appdevweb. The filter can be found by clicking on one of the categories in the right-hand menu of CollaborationToday.

If there are other HCL products that it would be useful for CollaborationToday to cover blog posts for, and you have a specific expertise in that area, we are open to adding categories for those too.

Watch a short intro to how to moderate articles on CollaborationToday.info here.

New Channels on OpenNTF Slack

Paul Withers | 1 month ago | Comments
Following this week's announcement about the end of Watson Workspace, the various members of the community asked for channels relating to IBM Collaboration Solutions / Collaborative Workflow Platforms technologies to be set up in OpenNTF Slack community. So following consultation we have channels for Connections on premises, Connections Cloud, Sametime, Domino admin, Domino dev and IBM Domino Mobile Apps. If you want to join, you can at https://slackin.openntf.org/ and then access the channels at https://openntf.slack.com.

For XPages there was already a separate community at https://xpages.slack.com/ and there are no plans to bring that thriving area into OpenNTF channels at this time. If you're working on XPages and are not yet in that chat, you can join by going to https://xpages-slack.herokuapp.com/.

If you're a new joiner and new to Slack, click on the word "Channels" and you get a list of channels you can choose from. Once you click on one, you're only browsing the content and will not yet get joined to it. To join the channel, click the link at the bottom of the chat. Clicking on the star under the bold channel name at the top of a chat adds it to your Starred channels. We would recommend everyone to click on their name, go to "Profile & Account" and set a display name. That ensures an understandable name appears when you ask questions.

It's great to see more IBM Champions already joining OpenNTF's slack and I'm sure this will help the breadth of conversation appearing in the general and random channels, as well as improving the excellent feedback members can get.