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About GlitterGallery
GlitterGallery is an ongoing project that aims to improve the state of designer-designer and designer-developer collaboration. FLOSS developers have always had an edge with respect to the tools they have to help them with collaboration activity. Designers have had great tools to create art and designwork and have been producing awesome, but when it comes to working as a team spread across the world, the current state of collaboration fails.
GlitterGallery hopes to be able to change that. We're first going to be biased to SVG work, and then we'll slowly progress to accommodate everyone.
People
- Emily Dirsh (emily AT glittergallery DOT net)
- Sarup Banskota (sarup AT glittergallery DOT net)
- Mo Duffy (duffy AT fedoraproject DOT org)
History
Mo's idea, UX hackfest, Emily's programming, LGM presentation, Sarup joined in...
Enhancements we need
Artwork
- logo - something that reflects that we collaborate on cloud, and that designers hang out here.
- cartoons that explain different actions
- setting up GG on OpenShift
- making a contribution to the codebase
An awesome commenting system
Possibly the most important component of GlitterGallery is the way it helps understand feedback. It would be useful to be able to support a commenting system that both provides socialization to some extent, while providing a way to distinguish useful feedback from the rest.
Things to work on in this direction:
- Likes/+1s/Upvotes for the comments. We need this to be implemented in a way that the entire page doesn't need a refresh.
- Threaded replies - let people reply to replies and so on.
- Mardown editor: currently, the comments support markdown, it will be really useful to provide with buttons to press for people who aren't used to writing in markdown. This feature can also be carried over to Glitterposts.
- Mark as issue: this is a very important area to improve on. It would be useful for the author of the project to be able to mark a particular comment as an issue - this could be transferred into the tracker for someone to work on.
- Overall UI - make the comment boxes expand as the user enters the comment, etc. Enable easy identification of project owner through tags or differently colored comment boxes.
- Allow references from commit pages etc
An issue tracker that works in sync with the commenting system
Things to work on in this direction:
- Sync comments to issues. When a user reports a comment as an issue, maybe it's a good idea to ask the user for some more information about the comment before checking it in as an issue, or maybe it isn't. Think what would be better in terms of UX.
- Allow project owners to let people take up issues.
- Allow refences on commits/pull requests, just like GitHub does.
- Integrate this with the user's email and in future, the GG notification system.
Socialization
Socialization is useful for people to be able to use the application effectively. While we don't intend to waste people's time by providing unnecessary feature sets, a minimum amount of socialization can go a long way in improving the overall design of the product.
Things to work on in this direction:
- Allow users to follow people, so they receive updates about their activity
- Allow users to follow projects, so they receive updates about progress of the project
- Notification system - for project owners to realize about pull requests etc
- Feed - that gives people updates from people & projects they follow
- Email integration - send out emails when new issues are reported, or when new pull requests are offered
Improved login
- Allow people to login through social media such as Facebook or Twitter
- Provide admininstrators with the option of only providing the kind of logins they allow
Better integration with Git
- The forking/merging process are currently ugly hacks that can be optimized through some code made available by the grit library
- GitHub seems to be moving to rugged, do we need to make the switch too?
User Interface / Overall visual appeal
We need serious help improving the overall UI of GlitterGallery. If HTML/Stylesheets/JS are your comfort zone, you can be of a lot of help! We currently need help with getting over the hacky design. We've cleaned up quite a bit and GlitterGallery is fairly usable, but it completely lacks visual appeal.
These are things you could get immediately involved with:
- Typography - what fonts do we choose?
- color scheme - we have a pale & boring one right now that serves the purpose, but we'd love to see interesting proposals for color schemes.
- Interactions - JS ninja? We need all of those sliding panels, smooth transitions and dynamism that web apps can't do without today, too!
- Markup/layout - we need to layout our content better - does the idea of convering sketch mockups to working html interest you?
Backend
Whether you're new to programming, intermediate honing your skills, or a serious rubyist, we can use your help. Some areas you can contribute to right away:
- Issue tracker - we're trying to build something similar to Bugzilla, but lightweight and minimal.
- Socialization - everything from authentication to notifications to newsfeeds
- Integrate grit better - love git? Now help GlitterGallery's backend use it better!
Tests
With features being added everyday, our test suites need improvement!
- Are you writing rspec tests? If yes, please help us improve ours or add new ones.
- Are you a designer? It would be great if you could use what currently exists and report issues!
- Are you a maintainer of a design team? We'll help you set up an instance of GlitterGallery for you.
Communication
Like/hate anything in particular? Let us know, we're just an email away! Just ping Sarup, he's always looking for someone to chat with during the afternoon classes. You could also just open up questions as issues on the GitHub page
- Twitter: @SarupBanskota
- email: sarup AT glittergallery DOT net
- GitHub: https://github.com/glittergallery/GlitterGallery