After the OOo 2.0.4 annoucement that provides new extensions improvement such as licencing and new extension .oxt, the extensions team is hard working setting up an ecosystem for developping extensions

The main points actually worked on are

• Translation toolkit : A long discussion has occured focusing mainly on the backend storage format (xml xcu OOo file format, po files, java properties format). While this is important the main focus regarding Extensions usability is to give developpers a cool and simple API to use and translators of every skill level a versatile tool to provide and test translations
  It seems something is beeing studied at Basic IDE level but this rather a new sun internal project and will be limited to dialogs translation on first release. This may be available in OOo 2.2+ and probably not downward compatible.
  As a short term solution, our great Paolo proposed a solution based on pyUNO and xcu file. it is a cool way to go as it will allow extension developpers to have their work being used in OOo 2.x versions and this toolkit can even be enhanced to support other file format.
• About deploying extensions, the actual command line based utility is rather secure but restrictive. It does not allow to use an existing library repository. The problem is that it sometimes behave too silently when de-activating some extensions. Some ideas (use of xlc files) and context restrictions are being discussed to see if something can be improved for user experience
• A new tool demonstrated at OooCon is now available - This NetBeans plugin is really cool and i think that an Eclipse one will also be available :) 
• A small team is setup for the web site - A great Art design work is being started by Ben while Jean-Pierre setups a first prototype. This will be available really soon as an alpha proposal release when server will have required tools
  

if you wish to join the Extensions team, please do. Everybody is welcomed, just tell us, we will find something for you ;)

Speaking about extensions, one as to note the new Sun Java OOo Blogger. This reminds me Caolan's work from last year. The same goal, done and freely available in pyUNO. It is freely available as a study case and use. I bet originality will be for the next extension. But if you want to fund SUN for supporting OOo, it is a way ...

At OOo level, a new team is built for a Creative Commons licence inclusion in OOo documents. If you whish to help visit them on their dedicated mailing list

And for volunteers, I give here some rough ideas for extensions. But, everything else is possible :)

• an impress autostart : OOo does not have a pps-like file format. The idea is to define a DocumentInfo.Info1 parameter, check it though a resident extension on impress file opening and auto start the presentation (level required : easy/medium)
• on-the-fly translation : on the model of OOoWikipedia, retreive the translation of an hilighted word and display it in OOo (level required : easy)
• S5 is a web based light format - create an assistant/filter allowing to export impress files to this format. mainly XSLT stuff but a wizard can also be setup (level required : skilled) 
• logo is a cool language for children to start with. OOoDraw API could be used to embedd such a tool. Note that an engine already exists in python, so using pyUNO could be a good idea
  

These tools creation and how they can be packaged as Extensions can be discussed on users@extensions.openoffice.org. The core part, the api use and help remains on dev@api.openoffce.org mailing list

I propose you to visit our enriched Wiki (some part are even being translated but any mediawiki tool pointer for multilingual support would be great) and join us on dev@extensions.openoffice.org to build the ecosystem, users@extensions.openoffice.org to start building extensions and #ooo-ext freenode IRC channel for a live chat

The 0.2 version of Occitan (languedocian) has been uploaded. Thanks to Bruno Gallart

A new spellchecker is also available Marathi (India)
This indian language is spoken by around 90 millions of people Wikipedia says

it has been a quite challenging work as from a word list in an encoding i could not read on first load, i end up with 'not-so-bad' solution :)
Thanks to Hunspell, the default engine of OOo 2.0.3, using UTF-8 is possible so the Marathi language became beautifull to me (well, unfortunatelly only as a picture)
Using CTL linguistic options as well as a dedicated font (all is explained in the readme file of the spellchecker), one can see that the spellchecker is working even if there are some missing word.
The next step is creating the affix file and enrich the word list. Some solutions are on the road though ...

Thanks Priti D. Patil and janabhaaratii Project  for giving this word list and releasing the spellchecker ressources under LGPL

This has been possible because Marathi (India) was a locale already defined at the OOo L10N  project level and available in OOo. So also thanks to the L10N project
I really like when energies are merging and i find that someone prepared a work i need as a basis :)

Both spellcheckers are available within DicOOo.
They're actually propagating on mirror so be patient ...
Be sure to read README file for special needed configuration if you're not in India

Other lingucomponent stuff being finalized and will be announced soon, stay tunned ...

Thanks to Andras Timar from fsf.hu, OOoWikipedia handles now magyar language.

OOoWikipedia is an OpenOffice.org extension that allow you by highlighting any word in a text document to popup a browser that connects directly to Wikipedia ressource on it.

OOoCon is approaching !! It will take place this year at Lyon (France) from the 11th to 13th of september

Some are already there as Lyon is a nice city place to visit (Pavel, Stefan, ...). I will personnaly come from Grenoble on sunday evening

A lot of interresting topics will be covered by the conferences on tuesday and wednesday, especialy regarding extensions and OOo scripting :) but also ODF topics as well as promising lingucomponent project spellchecker presentation

On monday many meetings are planned : QA, Extenstions, Marketing, ... a great time to discuss less formally

One more important point, our kiberpipa friends rock and kindelly accepted to reproduce their wonderfull effort from last year. We will have a professional-like media coverage that will cover (Note that all of this is done only with open sources tools):

• live video streaming

• archiving the video on the web
• interviews
• blog planet (send an email to ooocon@kiberpipa.org if you want your blog to be included)
• photo gallery

 
Also thanks to local helpers such as Charlotte, Cédric (obviously ;) ) and Geoffroy (not so local but so efficient)

The media coverage address : http://ooocon.kiberpipa.org (guess what, probably still under construction ;) )

This OOoCon promises to be great event, really !!!

Using OpenThesaurus by Daniel Naber, thesaurus for portuguese is now available in OpenOffice.org 2.0 though DicOOo (File > Wizards > Install new dictionaries)

Thanks to Paulo Trezentos and Rui Fernandez from Caixa Magica

The official monthly announcement for the article contest is out

The june winner of the OOo Article Contest is Kohei Yoshida for its
" Hacking Calc - The first steps"

Other articles are pending and will be re-evaluated in the next sessions. They're still in competition, so many chance to win :)

The July session ends at the end of the month, so feel free to submit any article on whatever aspect of OOo development you want to cover. Remember, this contest is sponsored ...

The past articles can be red on the OOo Wiki

The dictionaries installer DicOOo has been released under version 1.6

Dictionaries are now automatically activated at installation time and will be available for use just after restarting OOo. There is no more need to deal with Tools > Options > Linguistic settings ...

The update will be prompted on the next use of your DicOOo which is still available in File > Wizards > Install new dictionnaries

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 has been announced as out !
(french version is expected in the coming hours)

This announcement provides a security bulletin dealing with 3 potential vulnerabilities detected by internal security audits.

if you can not install this new 2.0.3 version for whatever reason, the issue dealing with java applet can be countered as mentionned on the Java Applets, CVE-2006-2199 dedicated page
(be carefull that other issues remain !!)

The solution proposed works great by deactivating java applets but is not so easy to deploy at large scale or for regular users. So i used the OOo Tools for what they are made for : The UNO Package concept that allow to create great extensions but also deploy configuration settings

So this addon reproduces what is proposed on the CVE page. It works for OOo 2.x as well as OOo 1.x

To deploy under OOo 2.x

• Tools > Package Manager > add and select the zip file
  or
  

• launch <OOoInstall>/program/unopkg <ZipFilePath>

To deploy under OOo 1.x

• launch <OOoInstall>/program/pkgchk <ZipFilePath>

Note that running these command lines with the -s switch (for share) let you deploy the addon for all your users

For testing that the patch has been applied correctly, you can insert an applet (eg. the JavaClock.class can be used for testing purpose) and see if it does not run.

You insert a java Applet though

• Insert > Object > Applet

Once the patch applied, only a drawing with the name of the applet should be displayed and the applet should not run anymore

This check also apply to already created document containing applets

L'appel à commentaire du Réferentiel Général d'Interropérabilité de la DGME touche à sa fin.
Un volet important concerne le format de fichier bureautique et des règles concernant OpenDocument sont proposées et discutées.

L'Alliance OpenDocument, dont Nuxeo est membre, publie une lettre ouverte à destination du Directeur de l'Agence de Modernisation de L'Etat afin de souligner les bénéfices et opportunités du format OpenDocument (ODF) pour l’Administration Française en mettant en avant les gains en terme d'indépendance, d'interopérabilité, d'innovation et préservation de l’héritage culturel entre autres.

OpenDocument est le format de fichier de référence d'OpenOffice.org (et d'autres suites bureautiques) et désormais reconnu par la plateforme CPS

Past days, i've uploaded some new dictionaries on the lingucomponent master server. DicOOo will now propose the following (once fully propagated):

• Occitan (languedoc) spellchecking (new) referenced as oc_FR
  
• Croatian spellchecking (update) and hyphenator (new) referenced as hr_HR and hyph_hr_HR
  
• Hebrew spellchecker (update) referenced as he_IL

Special mention to Bruno Gallart for its work on Occitan spellchecker !