This Month in Plume: July and August 2018

It has been a long time since the last This Month in Plume article, more than one month actually. Indeed, I decided to summarize both July and August in a single post, since the development have been a bit slower during summer (I was personally away from keyboard most of my time, and so were probably others contributors). Don't worry, it should get more dynamic again in the following days!

Updating the documentation

During these last days, the documentation of the project improved a lot. Before, it was quite complete, but many information were duplicated, hard to read, to find, and it was not always easy to tell which path to follow to achieve something.

I reorganized all the various files, and activated GitHub Pages publishing, which means that the documentation is now available on a nice website.

And thanks to nonbinaryanargeek, it now includes configuration snippets for Nginx, Apache, systemd and SysVinit.

There are probably a lot of things that could be added, or improved in the current documentation, and your help will always be welcome. Contributing to documentation is a simple but useful way to help!

The Federathon

For the first time, as far as I know, an ActivityPub hackathon has been organized this summer. Called "Federathon", and organized by @roipoussiere@mastodon.tetaneutral.net in the South of France, it brought together designers, students, and developers, all interested by ActivityPub and for some of them contributing to projects based on this protocol.

I had the chance to be part of these people. We talked a lot about various topics, like nomadic identities, project governance, UX design, creators funding in the Fediverse, etc. but one of the most important activity for Plume was the user tests. During an afternoon, @maiwann@framapiaf.org and @Natouille@mastodon.tetaneutral.net, who are both designers, organized two groups to test the UX and UI of Funkwhale (a federated music streaming server, check it out, it's amazing) and Plume.

For those who don't know what an user test is (I didn't knew it myself before I participated to these ones 😅), the idea is to give a task to accomplish in your app to someone (who can either be a person who never used the app or someone who have some experience with it), and to see how they do it. During all of this time, they describes what they is doing, what they sees, what they understands. There is a designer who is here to ask questions to guide them when they is lost (and also to define a "profile" at the beginning of the session). The developer of the app is next to these two persons and takes notes of what is misunderstood, what could be improved, what doesn't work at all, etc.

Plume was tested by @tcit@social.tcit.fr and @roipoussiere@mastodon.tetaneutral.net and only with these two session, I wrote more than four pages of notes (but it's nothing compared to the dozens of pages the Funwhale developers wrote), which resulted in more than 40 GitHub issues! Most of them were easy tasks, but they greatly improved the UX of Plume.

With @roipoussiere@mastodon.tetaneutral.net we also took the time to write a short introduction of what Plume is. This text is visible on each instance's homepage under the "What is Plume" section at the bottom.

The Federathon was a great experience, and I would like to thank all the people who were here and who organized it. I really hope that a second edition will take place next year.

If you speak French and want a more detailed summary of what we did, an article have been published on the Framablog.

New features

Of course, new features were added during these two months: Plume is still a young project, in the "fun" phase of development, when you spend more time adding new things than fixing bugs.

Speaking of the UI, @Madeorsk@aleph.land continued to do a great job. He first redesigned the forms to make them more readable and easier to use. Then, he redesigned the mobile menu, making a very nice interactive popup, only with CSS!

Admins will now be able to customize a little bit more their instances. A few settings to change the instance name, description and default license have been added. The short description is visible on the homepage, and the longer one on the "About" page.

This about page also displays the number of users, articles and connected instances, and who is the admin of the current instance.

Being able to follow blogs from the rest of the Fediverse is nice, but many of us are still using feed readers for that. That's why we added support for Atom feeds: go on a blog or author page and click the little "feed" icon to display it.

Another feature that was requested by many people was the ability to delete a post. It is now possible do it: under the title of your posts a little link to delete it will appear. Note that there is no confirmation window before deletion yet, so don't missclick!

Translations also improved a lot: xmgz added support for Galician, and snake66 for Norwegian! @MarcinMikolajczak@glitch.social continued to maintain the Polish translation, gnoxr improved the French one (making it more coherent and inclusive), and bitkeks updated the German one.

Another big feature feature that was needed to make Plume work correctly was the ability to fetch remote articles. Now, when you load a blog or an author from another instance, their articles get fetched in background and will be displayed next time you load the page. This is possible thanks to our new background worker system, that also allowed us to improve federation performance (activities are now sent in background, instead of blocking the instance for ages).

We also improved the notifications page: it has been completely redesigned to be easier to understand, according to the feedback I received during the Federathon.

On the list of smaller improvements, you can find the addition of a link to the blog in which an article was published on its card (thanks to Ilphrin), the threads in comments, and the pagination which will allow you to retrieve old articles. A lot of small bugs have also been fixed.

I think that's all for these two months. As always, your help is welcome, even if it is just giving your feedback or speaking of Plume around you. Thank you for reading this change log! 💚