This week marks the start of Movim's communication campaign. Our distributed social network is progressing well.

Our blog is now synchronised whith StatusNet (@Movim) and Twitter (@MovimNetwork), with Twitter replicating StatusNet. Those two microblogging have the advantage of bringing news to you and we count on you to relay our announcements! It's also a way to interact with you directly and to make more people aware of our project.

To feed our blog monthly, we exchange regularly on the official Mailing-List. This allows us to keep track of what happens and gives you the opportunity to intervene in our discussions. We welcome every opinion, so don't hesitate to give yours. When anything important is discussed on the Mailing List, we will write an article on this blog.

The Jabber chatroom movim@conference.movim.eu will of course always be available to talk with the community in real time. You can pop in to ask questions, let us know about your nodes, and anything else that doesn't fit on the Mailing List.

Finally we opened our Flattr account, the first donation platform we offer you to support us. This will pay our domain names, which are currently in the care of Edhelas and Etenil.

http://movim.eu/

Vincent - Communication Officer

While Movim 0.5, the first maintenance release of the 0.4 series is now available. Download it now!

Those of you who use Movim regularly probably noticed some bugs, here are some that this version 0.4.1 fixes:

• language switching issues
• too many constraints on passwords
• jabber disconnections

We encourage you to accelerate the development by reporting bugs. For this, log in to Launchpad and write a bug report.

Un tout petit billet pour vous annoncer la fermeture de l'important bug qui concernait les sessions des utilisateurs sur Movim.

En effet suite à un blocage (presque) aléatoire des variables de session au sein du projet, le navigateur de l'utilisateur se mettait à pinger dans le vide (erreur 500) puis finissait par se déconnecter. C'est Etenil qui m'a mis la puce à l'oreille en m'expliquant que nous fermions mal la session de la base de donnée dans Movim ce qui laissait des dizaines de sessions ouvertes au fur et à mesure de son utilisation. MySQL possédant une limite de sessions ouvertes (~150) finissait par bloquer l'accès aux variables, empêchant alors Movim de fonctionner correctement.

Etenil a alors proposé un patch fermant proprement cette session en base de donnée, puis nous avons effectué des test, lesquels se sont avérés concluants puisque l'utilisateur était resté connecté tout le temps de l'expérience (5h).

Ce patch sera, bien sur, intégré à la version 0.4.1 du projet, pour permettre aux serveurs actuellement déployés de rapidement en profiter!

Sachez, par ailleurs, que la feuille de route de la prochaine version de Movim (0.5) avance doucement mais surement.

N'hésitez pas à venir participer au projet ;)

Corrigé par ma copine !

After several months of development, version 0.4 of Movim is finally out!

This new release contains the following improvements:

• A very big bug was fixed on the session stability. It affected the identifiers of the BOSH session. For more details, have a look here.
• Many widgets have been rewritten and cleaned up to benefit from the latest improvements in the widgets'API.
• A lot of work was done on the cache, almost all data from the XMPP server are now copied in the database so the end users'session is always persistent, even after a rough page reload.
• The roster (contacts list) was rewritten so as to reorganise it and make it clearer. Contacts are now sorted by status, clicking on a contact opens up his profile, and clicking on the small bubble next to the name opens up a chat window.
• The chat was improved and now caches the last 20 messages. It also indicates when the contact is composing a new message.
• A lot of work was done on the feeds, and we implemented the Microblogging XEP. Users can now write and send messages on their feeds and read their contacts'feeds and comments instantly.

And many new features were added:

• The avatars are now processed with the GD library, then cached in the web browser for several hours. This way the pages generated by Movim are only a few kB of HTML code ; the CSS and javascript code are also cached in the browser.
• Movim now supports account creation on both the node and the XMPP server. The implementation handles many error cases and notifies the user as to what problem was encountered while creating the account (existing username, weak password etc.).
• When a new message is receive in Movim and the page is in the background, a [1] is prepended to the page title, and an HTML5 notification (soon to be standardised) is emitted. Firefox users need to intall this add-on to benefit from this feature.
• Two small patches allow Movim to be installed on HTTPS-only servers and to communicate with the XMPP server through a proxy.

You can find more details on the 0.4 roadmap.

Finally, the page pod.movim.eu was created to list all known Movim servers on which you can create an account an try the software in a couple of clicks.

You can download this new release over there.

Have fun!

Après de longues négociations avec l'administration (en particulier la Direction des Services Informatiques) de mon école d'ingénieur, Polytech Nantes, j'ai réussit à faire approuver l'ouverture, d'un pod (ou nœud) Movim pour les étudiants et le personnel en interne.

Je tente par ailleurs de rassembler un petit groupe d'intéressés au sein de l'établissement pour promouvoir et participer au développement au travers de leurs études (via ce qu'on appelle un "projet d'envergure").

Bien sur ce pod ne sera pas accessible que depuis l'enceinte de l'université (sécurité oblige) mais j'ai réussit à patcher Movim pour y ajouter le support des Proxy HTTP afin de lui permettre de se connecter à l'extérieur, vous retrouverez ce patch dans la version 0.4 du projet qui va sortir dans les jours qui arrivent. Ainsi les (futur) comptes qui seront créés sur le serveur de l'université pourront dialoguer en toute transparence avec les autres nœuds Movim (et clients Jabber).

Je vous tiens au courant de l'évolution de la situation ;)

Bonjour tout le monde,

Je vous rédige ce petit message afin de vous tenir au courant de l'avancée de la version 0.4 du projet.

Malheureusement celui-ci n'a pas pu être releasé dans les temps. Je suis, en effet, retenu par une masse assez importante de travail pour mes études (fin de semestre oblige) et je n'ai donc malheureusement pas le temps de finaliser le code actuel en vue de sa publication.

Je compte donc reprendre et terminer ce que j'ai à faire pour les cours d'ici deux semaines pour (enfin) faire les derniers patchs importants sur le code qui sont :

• Créer le flux et la vCard vierge au premier lancement d'un nouveau compte (pour le moment je suis obligé de faire cette partie à la main) pour finaliser la création d'un compte XMPP complet depuis l'interface Movim
• Corriger toutes les erreurs de langue et exporter les fichiers à traduire pour l'interface de Launchpad
• Traduire intégralement en langue française
• Faire une revue du code

Et enfin packager et releaser :)

Dans les semaines qui suivront je ne travaillerai pas directement sur le code mais je serai en priorité sur la documentation et l'organisation du projet afin de la mettre à jour et de faciliter la vie des futurs développeurs et administrateurs, il y aura donc :

• Une mise à jour du tutoriel de déploiement sur le serveur Web
• Un tutoriel qui expliquera la bonne configuration du serveur XMPP afin de le lier à Movim (sur eJabberd uniquement pour le moment)
• Une mise à jour progressive de la documentation développeurs, en particulier du coté du développement des Widgets

Si certaines personnes sont partantes pour donner un petit coup de main , notamment pour la traduction du projet (les langues traduites avant la release seront intégrées au package final) ainsi que des pages du Wiki, contactez moi, j'aurais du travail pour vous ;)

Merci et à bientôt !

Corrections des fautes par Manildomin

The website has experienced some technical difficulties last week, taking down parts of our infrastructure. This came from access rights issues with our hosting association.

Everything is now back to normal and no data were lost. The project keeps going on track thanks to Edhelas, who is currently finalizing the interface. We'll keep you updated about our progress here.

See you very soon!

Vincent - Communications Officer

Etenil is one of the Movim's main developers, and one of the biggest contributors. He donates his spare time and experience to the project for more than a year now.

Vincent: etenil, Who are you?

etenil: I am two different persons. Guillaume has been a professional web developer for four years, he lives in London and is 27 years old. He got to know the Free Software philosophy by seeing weird mentions about "GNU" in is first distro (mandrake), and has been a Free Software activist ever since, and the FSF member #6635 ;). Etenil is a smug Unix user who lives in a cave somewhere with EMACS and keeps a whip with him.

Vincent: When did you join?

etenil: More than a year ago, but gitorious won't tell me the exact date :/. I read a piece of news about Diaspora that also mentioned Movim, so I popped up on the chatroom but there wasn't much activity there. I went back a month later and I saw there was no change. By chatting with one of the users, I discovered that there was only one inexperienced developer. At the time I had other projects of my own, but my profile was too useful to movim for me to ignore, so I contacted Edhelas and told him straight-away "Now there's two of us.", and here I am.

Vincent: What is you role within the project?

etenil: I am one of the two core developers of Movim. Since I have some experience in middleware thanks to my project of PHP framework, I naturally took on the project's structure and I'm quite the grease monkey of the team.

I also applied my past experience for the project's logicstics, for instance by defining release procedures and quality checks during the merge process so that the code has always been read by at least two persons.

I'm also the official whipper of the project and custodian of Movim's standard issue nailed whip in order to punish developers that produce bad code :D.

Vincent: The project has evolved a lot in a rather short time. How do you see Movim's future?

etenil: This is a complex question. Movim has indeed progressed a lot faster than what I expected, but we often face issues from technical constraints that come from our choices (e.g. PHP and XMPP), I think we'll make it eventually, but it'll take a lot longer than if we had written our own protocol from scratch.

But Movim isn't a typical project. Technical superiority won't be enough in the long run, and we need to benefit from a network effect so as to attract a critical mass of users for the project to live on. Eventually it will come down to a communication battle rather than technical. Fortunately, we have a very fine communication manager who does a great job :D.

Vincent: Decentralized social network projects are blossomin all over the Internet nowadays. As a developer, what advice would you give to improve interoperability?

etenil: Interoperability won't be a problem. The fact is that no one wishes to inter-operate. Projects that chose to roll their own protocol won't want to change to a more generic and more complex one like XMPP. And adding extra protocols would prove a heavy work and their maintenance nightmarish for developers who don't care much for other protocols.

In my opinion, Movim can just use XMPP gateways, this way we won't have to worry about other protocols at all. But we have to be aware that eventually the de facto standard will be that of the biggest project.

I also think that we should have an optimistic view of all this. We all are Free projects and share the same goals. So there's no real competition. It's better to see it as a big melting pot of experimental social networks out of which the best one will appear. Diversity has always been a great strength of Free software no matter what some people think, and all this activity is very healthy.

Vincent: What desktop environment do you use every day?

etenil: I've liked XFCE since the first time I tried, but GNOME2 was very very good, so I never stayed with XFCE. Fortunately, GNOME3 gave me the perfect excuse to final get down to it. Please note that Linus Torvalds copied on me about this :D.

Vincent: Thanks a lot for your time :).

Vincent is our most recent team member. He joined us around three weeks ago and is our Communication Manager. To celebrate his joining our effort (and since we have time after the release of Movim 0.3), here's an interview of our new teammate:

Vincent: My name's Vincent, I'm 20 and a linux user for a year and a half now. I have a few projects of my own and a blog. I'm a third-year IT student. The 98% of Internet users - which I was still a part of not so long ago - who haven't had a taste of Free software have no idea of what the remaining 2% are able to do. And it really changes one's day to day life.

Etenil: How did you get to know Movim?

Vincent: I first came across Movim when it only started. I don't quite remember how (I still used Windows back then), perhaps just by looking around.

Etenil: What is it that motivated you to contribute to Movim?

Vincent: Honestly? Edhelas! I've been waiting for Movim for a very long time. When I write articles about it, Edhelas always requested help to advance the project's translations. Unlike this summer, I really didn't have time back then. So a midday, I popped up on the website, saw the languages list and I thought to myself `Alright, how could I get languages from so many countries translated?". I had the idea of going to get contributions myself on linux forums of two of the biggest communities for each country on the list, then I posted the same message describing the project and our needs. Contributions soon started to flood in. It's pretty simple actually, if Movim get referenced abroad, we are likely to get more contributors and the project grows faster!

Etenil: What is your position in the projet exactly?

Vincent: I'm in charge of the communication, that is I'm maintaining the website, I advertise the project, I manage the referecing/SEO, I keep up to date with what blogs write about Movim so we can answer all requests. Obviously, I'm also pushing the translations :) It's really exciting to be the link between the community, the contributors and the core developers.

Etenil: Are you a Facebook user?

Vincent: Not anymore for a year now, I closed my account. Nevertheless, I had to re-open a private account that only contains my family members who have given up on any other form of digital communication. It's sad to have to choose between your convictions and what reality forces onto you. Fortunately, because Facebook uses XMPP, I can talk with them by only using Gajim. I don't want to lose contact, but I really hope I can introduce them to something better in the near future.

Etenil: What do you think Movim lacks to be as appealing as facebook?

Vincent: I'm not sure the question is relevant; on the one hand, most users ask for games an silly applications, on the other a smaller number of people expects really useful features like audio calls, video conferencing, or that we surprise them with the many unexploited features of the XMPP protocol. Movim is expected to do everything, a sort of mixture between Skype, Facebook, Twitter and PiratePad!

Etenil: You're new to the project, what do you think of the team?

Vincent: It's a brilliant small team! Actually it's human-sized, I mean by this that it's like a family: we argue, we laugh, we work, we take decisions and we wish each other good night together. That's a bit exggerated, but it's great to be able to work with people who follow ideals we draw all our motivation from. We can barely feel the age difference ;).

Etenil: To finish, what's your favourite text editor?

Vincent: Kate (which I miss, since I'm now using Ubuntu).

Etenil: Thank you for your time, and I wish you all the best with us!

Only a few days after Movim 0.3's release, we kindly ask for your contribution.

This third snapshot in our development process showed up the usual number of unexpected bugs. We need your bug reports and have set up a demo node for you to test movim:

Demo : http://etenil.net/movim/

Login : movim@etenil.thruhere.net

Password : movim

We are now busy defining the roadmap for Movim 0.4 as our post-release stage, so it's important to us to list the maximum number of bugs at this time.

Contributing is easy: just try our demo and let us know if you find a bug. Then fill in a bug report explaining what you did, what happened and what you expected on the following website:

http://codingteam.net/project/movim/bugs/?order=id:desc

Thanks a lot for your help!