Likalo

For the past few months we (Emil (emilsedgh) and Eugene (it-s), well Emil mostly ) were working on a KDE related website, which we call usekde.com We think it's now good enough to be filled up with data, so we're introducing it here.

Usekde is (currently) a software catalog for KDE applications (not libraries) with the following goals:

1. being user-friendly (where user means someone who doesn't know anything about KDE and FOSS generally, no matter what his OS is);
2. being easily updatable with minimum data maintenance effort. Something like “update it per release and forget about it”;
3. being very well organized, as clean as possible and search engine friendly.

So in essence usekde's main goal is to bring Okular to people who search for a 'free pdf reader'.

To achieve this goal, we employ three main features:

1. Package management - each package is a software category or what we call 'svn module', like kdebase, kdenetwork and such.
2. Project management - each project is an application with a description, some screen shots, maybe a FAQ section, link to handbook and link to bugzilla. Things that a simple user needs.
3. Operating system management - KDE is an upstream project and needs distributors to ship it. All those different distro's + kde on win + kde on mac are kde's distros.

With the above tools, we can add modules, projects and operating systems. Then we can have a to-do for each project on a specific OS. (People will hate you for this one )
This way we can offer a very easy way of installing applications to users.

Of course this raises some questions. For instance:

Q: There are so many KDE websites, make why another one?
A: Actually almost each project has a .kde.org website but "we think" most of them (read all of them) are not good enough for an average user.

Q: It reminds me of kde-apps.org
A: Its doing almost the same thing but there are some main differences: a) it tries to look like official website; b) its almost read-only, at least for users; c) data entered in it must be qualified and its NOT going to have lots of features (grouping, users, friends, forums, twitter like messages and such). Remember i said 'it tries to look like official page'? We, of course, are not trying to replace kde website nor being an official website at all, but just look a bit serious.

Q: What is the software running there?
A: Its a free cms-like framework Emil has been working on for the past few years. Its called “Persism” and is currently hosted on gitorious. Its built using php and mysql.

Q: Why not use an existing cms, like drupal?
A: The problem with existing CMS offerings is that they are either too complex, bloated with features, or too simplistic. Creating a custom system insures it will serve the purpose it was intended for.

Q: Why not use a wiki?
A: Wiki's are not suitable for every kind of websites. As we said, one of the main things we wanted for this site was to collect the updated information, and to keep the maintenance easy which does not work with wikis, as they need/try to be maintained all the time. Also wikis don't look too official.

Q: What if someone ruins all data on it? I prefer svn revisions!
A: It currently doesn't supports revisions but it has got a trash of deleted content A trash for a cms is not as handy as your desktop trash so I'm working on another version which supports taxonomy and revisions

Q: i18n?
A: We have no plans for a multilingual content support. For the interface it's not supported yet, but we had it in mind and if it is needed it can be implemented fast.

Q: I want to see project x there. What should i do?
A: You can take a look at demo.usekde.com which is open for editing to see how you can update the site. If you want, you can register on main site and contact me for getting privileges.

Q: What else you need except project data?
A: Howto's for installing projects on differrent os'es. For example: for OpenSuSE people we can add one-click-install buttons to their specific how-to; and for Debian people we can have a package name of a project and tell how to install it.

Q: I don't want to register but i have an openid account
A: Openid is not supported yet. We don't have any plan for supporting it unless it's really necessary. Registration is easy and takes just a few seconds.

Q: Future?
A: Of course we have some plans, like taxonomy and revision and per-project acls. Also we want to generate handbooks inside the project instead of linking to docs.kde.org We will also be happy to support getting some stats from bugzilla (if necessary that is).

Q: There are some features missing, I think...
A: Of course there are. We will be happy to know and implement your ideas.

Q: Why there is there no news section?
A: Because as we said, we want it to be 'update-per-release' and the *latest* news from 3 years ago makes project pages feel completely outdated. Though if the usage grows we'd be more than happy to implement it.

Q: So, you want to replace kde.org with this then?
A: NO! This website was never meant to be anything official in a sense of being what apple.com is to Apple. Maybe, in time, if it takes off and people accept the idea, this site (or a better version of it) will become an 'official' KDE hub. But for now it's more of a fan project.

Interested? Have comments (positive, or negative)? Want to talk? Come to #kde-www @ freenode