Tag Archives: Site Update

Major environment update requires downtime and modifies repository URIs

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We are about to deploy a larger change of the environment, which will affect how you access the repositories. After the deployment a project will be able to have more than one repository. The path from where you access the repositories will change from ​https://projects.developer.nokia.com/$repo_type/$project_name to ​https://projects.developer.nokia.com/$project_name/$repo_type/$repo_name. For already existing projects the repository name will be the same as the project name.

The tools for managing Subversion and Git repositories can be used to relocate the existing local copies/clones. Please refer to the manual of the tool you are using to manage the version control system.

The deployment will happen on Tuesday, May 7th and the entire service will be unaccessible during this time. We will start the deployment around 7 am Finnish time, and it is estimated to last 2 – 3 hours.

Permissions update made some projects private

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Recent software update improving the permission system of projects made some public projects private. The projects are still accessible by all users, but their visibility status is “private”. This could lead to some weird behavior, and, for instance, announcement created are not shown on the Projects front page.

There is an easy way to fix the problem: Simply navigate to permissions settings page (Admin -> Permissions) and click the “Make public” button.

Better wiki sidebar navigation

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The Nokia Developer Wiki sidebar makes our most important platforms and resources visible to users from any page of the wiki.

Choosing the right entries to go into the sidebar is important: too few entries and users have to navigate through many hoops to find the right information, too many and it becomes hard for users to find the relevant information (and hard for moderators to maintain!)

We’ve now simplified the sidebar so that it highlights the platforms that are most most important to Nokia Developers (Windows Phone and Series 40). We’ve also updated the platform entry points themselves so that you can readily find the specific development or technology topics of interest within the platform context.

Other platforms and development categories of most interest are still available from the sidebar, but now they are in the “Other” section (which will be needed by less people). We’ve also tidied up the wiki resources section, moving inessential topics into the Help page.

We hope you find this structure makes the wiki easier to navigate – if you have any comments or suggestions for improvement, you can let us know here or on the discussion boards.

Incorrect default project permissions in recently created and published projects

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Projects that were created or published between October 17, 2012, and November 27, 2012 may have incorrect permissions!

The default groups have been granted too few permissions due to mis-configuration. This means that, for example, the project members in the “Members” group haven’t had the permission to commit anything to the version control by default, because they lack the VERSION_CONTROL permission.

The actions we have taken to deal with this issue (and what you can do) are covered in Help & Support ticket [https://projects.developer.nokia.com/HelpAndSupport/ticket/346 #346].

Code syntax markup added to Nokia Developer Blogs

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We’ve just updated the Blogs to add proper support for code syntax markup, which will be a great relief to posters who have been trying to get decent looking monospace code blocks using odd combinations of pre and code tags, and proper layout using HTML br tags.

All you need to do is add a lang=”language-code“ attribute to your pre tag and copy-paste your formatted text into the block. You can also add line marking (using attribute line=“number“) and line “highlighting” (using attribute highlight=“3“). Check out the example below:

CSharp without line numbers 

#region Properties
public RelayCommand CTest { get; private set; }
 
private ObservableCollection _CtxItems;
public ObservableCollection CtxItems
{
    get
    { return _CtxItems; }
    set
    {
        if (_CtxItems == value)
        {
            return;
        }
        var oldValue = _CtxItems;
        _CtxItems = value;
        base.RaisePropertyChanged("CtxItems");
    }
}

Csharp with line numbers and highlight

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#region Properties
public RelayCommand CTest { get; private set; }
 
private ObservableCollection _CtxItems;
public ObservableCollection CtxItems
{
    get
    { return _CtxItems; }
    set    {
        if (_CtxItems == value)
        {
            return;
        }
        var oldValue = _CtxItems;
        _CtxItems = value;
        base.RaisePropertyChanged("CtxItems");
    }
}

The implementation is not (at time of writing) perfect – there isn’t quite enough space around blocks that don’t have line numbers, XML does not work unless you first escape HTML entitites, and nor does captioning. For documentation of how to use this feature (and for the current state of development) see our User Guide.

Examples

Java

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public class Hello {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello World!");
  }
}

Csharp

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#region Properties
public RelayCommand CTest { get; private set; }
 
private ObservableCollection _CtxItems;
public ObservableCollection CtxItems
{
    get
    { return _CtxItems; }
    set
    {
        if (_CtxItems == value)
        {
            return;
        }
        var oldValue = _CtxItems;
        _CtxItems = value;
        base.RaisePropertyChanged("CtxItems");
    }
}
 
private string _SelectedCtxItems;
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public class Hello {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello World!");
  }
}

C++

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ref class myFactory sealed : Windows::ApplicationModel::Core::IFrameworkViewSource
{
public:
    virtual Windows::ApplicationModel::Core::IFrameworkView^ CreateView()
    {
         return ref new myView();
    };
};

html4strict

 
<button type="button" name="stepUp">Add 10</button>
<button type="button" name="stepDown">Subtract 10</button>

CSS

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@font-face {
    font-family: 'iconic';
    src: url('webfonts/iconic.eot');
    src: url('webfonts/iconic.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
         url('webfonts/iconic.svg#iconic') format('svg'),
         url('webfonts/iconic.woff') format('woff'),
         url('webfonts/iconic.ttf') format('truetype');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
}

javascript

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input.addEventListener('invalid', function(e) {
    if(input.validity.valueMissing){
        e.target.setCustomValidity("PLZ CREATE A USERNAME, YO!"); 
    } else if(!input.validity.valid) {
        e.target.setCustomValidity("U R DOIN IT WRONG!"); 
    } 
}, false);

XML (with escaped HTML entitities

Note, uses escaped=”true”

<!--ContentPanel - place additional content here-->
 <grid grid.row="1" x:name="ContentGrid">
   <listbox itemcontainerstyle="{StaticResource ContexMenuItemStyle}" itemssource="{Binding CtxItems}" selecteditem="{Binding SelectedCtxItems, Mode=TwoWay}" x:name="lbxTest">
  </listbox>
 </grid>

Problematic examples

XML

Defective because only comment shown – not subsequent lines

<!--ContentPanel - place additional content here-->

PHP

Defective, because PHP code not shown

<div>
 
</div>

Captions (file and/or file path of the source file)

Defective, because no caption shown

public class Hello {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello World!");
  }
}

Promote your project with announcements

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Now you’ve gone to the effort of creating and sharing a Nokia Developer project you will want people to see and use it, and you may even need help with its development.

One of the best ways is to make your project more visible is to ensure it appears on the Nokia Projects landing page. This page lists the most active projects, the newest projects, recent changes in any project, and the most interesting projects (as featured by the Project Moderation team). So if make any change or make a lot of changes, then your project will appear!

We’ve now added one more way to highlight your project: announcements from individual projects are shown on the landing page:

Project announcements

Announcements from all projects are shown on the project landing page

If you make a new release, win an award, or do anything else cool, then navigate to the Discussion section in your project and create a new topic under Announcements forum. The service will then pick up the announcement and display it on the landing page.

There are a bunch of other things you can do to promote your project, some of which are captured in the article Growing a successful project. For example, you can give your project more visibility in explorer by adding appropriate categories and being more active. And of course you can always promote your project by creating interesting articles in the main wiki covering aspects of the development, or using social media.

Managing project files and downloads just got easier

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Featuring a binary release on your project summary page is a great way of making them available and obvious to your users. We’ve just made this a lot easier to do (along with the management of your other files).

Featured Files

Previously, featured downloads were uploaded and managed separately from other files in a “well hidden” section of the Admin tab. In the most recent Project’s update the downloads functionality has now been merged into the “Files tab”. This means that files only need to be uploaded once, and that its obvious how to feature them.

Existing projects have been migrated to use the new system, and any entered description and platform details for featured downloads will have been preserved (the version detail field no longer exists). Note that if you didn’t have a description before, we highly recommend you go and add one now.

In addition to new support for featuring, we also improved the file management tools: now you only “need” to use WebDAV if you have to upload a lot of files in a single session.

For more information see our help documentation and the enhancement ticket.

Qt C++ markup on the wiki just got a whole lot better

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Wiki code syntax markup has just been improved significantly.

The most important change is much better Qt C++ markup: if you mark up your code blocks using code cpp-qt (instead of code cpp) then Qt core classes are automatically linked to their corresponding documentation! The image below shows a side-by-side comparison of cpp vs. cpp-qt markup – note how QApplication is a link on the right hand side.

Side by side comparison of Qt and Qt cpp

We’ve gone through all Qt articles on the wiki and updated all instances of “code cpp” with “code cpp-qt”. Please do the same in your future Qt articles!

The update also provides numerous other small improvements to markup, including better support for C# (adds more keywords).

Community website update 2012Q3 improves UI, documentation and performance

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Most of the improvements to the community infrastructure in 2012Q3 have been “under the hood”. For projects in particular we’ve done a lot of work to profile and improve performance – allowing us get better page load times even if running on less capable hosting hardware.

The visible changes are primarily small but important changes to the user interface. For example we’ve added breadcrumb to the top project discussion boards thread and forum lists to make it easy to navigate between threads and forums (as shown below)

We also made it more obvious how to set advanced filters on ticket queries, fixed some layout bugs and made the appearance of generated lists more attractive/consistent. We improved the project “following behaviour“, and added better documentation on how it works.

Lastly in Projects, we made significant updates to the home page and documentation; they both look a lot better, and the important information is much easier to find.

In the wiki, we’ve been putting a lot of effort into improving the Windows Phone portal. It now uses pseudo “live tiles” to make it obvious you’re in Windows Phone territory on the wiki, and has been well categorised to make it easy to find the information you might need. There are over 300 articles, many of which were contributed in this quarter.

There have been many other wiki updates, including the addition of an area for Indonesian content, and improvements to the organisation of content in Series 40 Java and Web app areas.

You can find more detail on all changes in the Community Help & Support project. If you have any other suggestions for improvement to any of the community infrastructure (wiki, projects, discussion boards, blogs) then please raise them there.

Hamish Willee (Community Manager)

PS: My special thanks to the Wiki and Project moderators for their ongoing (voluntary) support for the community on these services.

Wiki improvements for 2012Q2

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Its been a very busy quarter for the wiki moderation and community services team. We’ve made numerous organisational improvements to make articles easier to find, and content improvements to make them easier to read. We’ve also made it easier to create and edit content.

The biggest content change was the merge of the 1200+ article Knowledgebase into the wiki. We’ve renamed and unprotected the articles so that anyone can now edit them. We’ve also done a basic review and archived articles that we think aren’t relevant to developers on today’s devices.

We’ve continued to add ArticleMetaData to articles make it easier to work out how useful they might be “at a glance”. To help you work out relevance of an article before you open it (for example, when you see it in a category, as link text, or when searching) all archived articles now have the “Archived:” prefix in their name.

In terms of organisation we’ve reviewed many hundreds of articles and added the correct categories, created more portal pages to organise them better, and improved many of our more important category pages (including those for Windows Phone and Series 40).

For article creators and editors we’ve made one very minor but significant change – the editor window is now taller so you can see a lot more of the text you’re editing without having to scroll. On Firefox and Chrome it can also be expanded should you need an even bigger window.

For a more detailed view on the changes made, please check out the milestone report.

With all of that, we still found time to run a hugely successful imaging competition and kicked off a new one for Series 40. We’re looking forward to seeing what great articles you can come up with!

Hamish Willee
On behalf of the Wiki Moderators and Community Service team