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Towards an Xfce Foundation?

Jannis Pohlmann announced two days ago on the Xfce mailing lists that he started the paperwork needed to register Xfce as a non-profit organization under the German law which would be nice because, I quote:

The benefits are obvious: Xfce would become a legal entity with an official board of directors and we could raise funds in the form of donations and via supporting members in order to organize hackfests etc.

The current draft is available on gitorious. Expect more news on this in the following days and feel free to comment on our mailing lists.

Xfce4 Display Settings status

As promised, here comes the post about recent changes in Xfce4 Display Settings. For those who do not know, Xfce4 Display Settings is the dialog which allows you to set the screen resolution, refresh rate, to activate external monitors, etc.In Xfce 4.6, it only had one problem: it was totally useless and not working.

Then came mr_pouit, who decided it was time to clean that mess! He started to dig in the xrandr code to understand how the kryptic Randr API works and to bring that sweet magic to Xfce. So what do we have at the moment?

Display Settings

The new dialog is at the moment almost similar to the old one, except that every thing should work correctly and that it is rocking simple to use! We also added some goodies such as timed confirmation for critical changes and a simple dialog which can be called with the media keys or with Win + P to quickly configure an external output.

Timed Confirmation

Minimal Display Settings

But there is more to come! First, we are still working on fixing bugs, simplifying the code to make it rocking stable and awesome like Barney's suit. Then, we are planning a lot of UI improvements, the biggest one being a graphical way of setting the screens' layout : it will allow the user to set the relative positions of external monitors. We hope to have that done in the next two weeks, but it could take a little more time. And yes, that'll mean that 4.8 TODO list will have lost one item ;)

Yes, Xfce 4.8 is delayed!

I've seen a lot of people on IRC lately asking why 4.8 was not released on the 12th of June as scheduled. Well, the schedule could not be respected and we currently have no scheduled release date. There is still a lot of work to do and we lost several key contributors and we obviously did not gain new ones...

So if you want to see Xfce 4.8 out, come and help us! We need help to implement the 4.8 features (have a look at the bottom of schedule page, there are links to the goals of each module) and to fix bugs.

A good way to get started is to choose some bugs on the Xfce bugzilla and to submit patches, come and bug us on #xfce to get your patches reviewed (it may take a while but that's definitely useful!). We need a lot more contributors if we want to get things moving forward!

In a post that will follow shortly, I will discuss a merrier topic: the new awesome work of the mighty mr_pouit (his only vice being that he maintains Xubuntu :D) on the display settings dialog (the dialog to set the screen resolution, frequency...). Stay tuned! (Yes, this means we are still active :D)

Xfce4 XKB plugin needs a new maintainer

Alexander Iliev, the current Xfce4 XKB plugin maintainer, sent a message to the goodies-dev ML telling that he is looking for a new maintainer for xfce4-xkb-plugin. Please get in touch with him if you are interested.

xfce4-xkb-plugin currently has 38 open bugs on the Xfce bugzilla, 4 of them have a patch in bugzilla. This plugin to switch between different keyboard layouts has a lot of users, so you'll make a lot of happy users if you start working on this! Xfce needs you!

Web developers and contributors needed for xfce.org

This post is the first (well, second if you count the one for Xfce4 Screenshooter) of a series of post offering some ways to get involved in Xfce. We need more people if we want to keep improving Xfce!

We are looking for new persons to help us to take care of the Xfce web site. We need a web developer/designer to handle the technical details and someone to improve/update the contents (can be the same person).

Our web site runs a home made PHP based CMS (with no online interface) which we would like to keep (improvements and bug fixes are welcome of course) for the time being. Though, its contents needs some love: some pages are strongly outdated, the style could be refreshed, some pages still use tables for layout, etc. We also need to find a solution for localization: the current system requires the user to translate raw PHP pages and often leads to errors when going live, up to the point that we are considering dropping translations. This will highly depend on the people who get involved in the web site.

The web developer position requires a good PHP, HTML and CSS knowledge to be able to handle the different aspects of the web site. A good command of English to update/rework the different pages and make the web site easier to use, this also requires to follow the Xfce development to update the web site accordingly. Of course, this work can be done as a team if several persons step in. This is a good opportunity to start contributing to the Xfce project and this work will be appreciated by a lot of Xfce users.

Please contact me if you are interested. Thank you in advance!

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