I’ve had a chance to meet lots of other folks as well, and have had tons of great, inspiring, and amazingly energizing conversations over the past three days. Being in a room with 400 brilliant, dedicated, passionate, and incredibly hard-working Mozillians is humbling. I am astonishingly lucky to be part of this community. So, even though there were bears, and a rockslide that blocked the road, and a power outage, and even snow in July — this has been the best Summit ever.

So what’s new? Since my departure from the Mozilla Developer Center project, it seems to be whizzing along like a well-oiled machine, producing docs and excruciatingly cute posters at top speed. Basically, the whole thing is doing just fine without me, which means either I did something very right, or I was excess baggage the whole time. I’m sure opinions vary.

While no longer working on MDC, I’ve been scrabbling around madly trying to figure out how to do my new job which involves a bewildering array of meetings, email, various documents, and a strange mix of Firefox 3 and Mozilla Labs.

Most recently, Mozilla Labs has had an extreme web makeover to jazz up its look and feel to be more unique, happier, and brighter. Hopefully it reflects the spirit of play and exploration with which we want to infuse all things related to Mozilla Labs. We have also launched the new Mozilla Labs Community Forum where everyone is welcome to participate and help drive the future of web innovation and invention. There’s also a new Labs IRC channel at #labs on the irc.mozilla.org server, so feel free to drop by and chat. A good time will be had by all.

In Firefox 3 news, the requirements document is shaping up nicely and we’re hoping to get it under a formal change request system in the near future. If you have any comments about the draft change request system (see link), feel free to comment on the Talk page, or in the dev.planning thread I just started for this very purpose.

Soon I’ll be heading to lovely Boston for the Mozilla Developer Day where apparently I’ll be chatting about Mozilla Labs. I’ve never spent any time in Boston at all (in spite of knowing a bunch of people there), so I’m looking forward to finally seeing the city. Fun times. Later, in mid-April, I’ll be heading down to Mountain View for a week of meetings and planning and etc etc. Etc.

These statistics don’t include the huge amount of incredible work the localization teams have been doing, of course, and I would like to thank them (a thousand times over) for all their help and contributions. And thanks to everyone else who has ever contributed to the project in any way. Clearly none of this would be possible without you :)

The initial XUL Reference migration has been completed. We do need some help in improving this reference in several ways:

• More examples
• Screenshots of the various widgets (ideally taken in Windows or Mac)
• More cross-linking within the reference and between the reference and the XUL Tutorial
• Links out to the LXR source where appropriate
• Improved and expanded text for any page within the reference

Sheppy will also be working on copy-editing and other improvements when he has time.

Discussion about replacing “Talk” pages

At the Mozilla all-hands meeting it was suggested that we begin exploring possible replacements for the Wiki “Talk” pages, as the existing pages are poorly suited to actual discussion as they lack threading, structure, editorial control, and any sort of guaranteed permanence. After a long discussion Brion Vibber let us know that the Mediawiki group had a Summer of Code project underway that sounds like it will do exactly what we need. You can read more about the LiquidThreads project on the Wikimedia Meta-wiki.

Suggested new feedback system

Another suggestion from the all-hands meeting is that MDC create a system that would allow users to quickly and easily send feedback from any given page of the MDC site without having to deal with Talk pages, registering on the wiki, or looking up email/list addresses. The system we’re currently planning to implement is simply a new, open mailing list with a mailto: link on each page of the wiki (either in the footer or sidebar).

Content additions and improvements

• Mscott has added a new article about Thunderbird ISP hooks
• Wtchang has started an NSS reference, and is looking for help doing some migration work
• Jabez and Nickolay have been working diligently to improve our Gecko DOM Reference
• Sevenspace and Nickolay have been working to further improve the JavaScript reference
• XUL Reference

Localizations

As always, the localization teams have been doing a fantastic job, with recent significant activity on the Italian, Spanish, French, Japanese, Polish, and Portuguese wikis.

If you have any questions about anything here or anything else related to the MDC, please ask on the MDC discussion list, the #devmo channel on irc.mozilla.org, or mail me directly (deb-at-mozilla-dot-com).

To make the process go a lot more quickly, I could use some help in sorting the attribute, property, and method lists for each element. We will be including an alphabetical list of these on each element page, including all those that are inherited from the XUL and DOM elements. So each element needs to have three separate lists (attributes, properties, and methods) and the things inherited from the DOM element need to be marked as such (the linking for DOM items will be different than XUL).

If you could help with the creation and sorting of those lists, please find me in the #devmo channel on irc.mozilla.org. Any help would be appreciated here, because it can be a bit time consuming. Thanks!

Update: after a somewhat agonizing (and ongoing) debate over a few things, it turns out that this is largely unnecessary.  If you started working on these lists, you have my eternal gratitude, but it turns out we’re not going to need them.  Thanks!

Other XTech presentations, including Layout Algorithm Improvements for Web User Interfaces, Microsummaries for Firefox and on the Web, SVG and Canvas: Graphics for Web Apps, and Converging Rich-Client and Web Application Development with Mozilla XULRunner are available here: XTech 2006 Presentations.

I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused, I can assure you that we’ll be reviewing our processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Thanks for your patience.

Update: we’re still noticing some issues and have thus locked the database for the time being. Current rollback is at almost a full day right now, but we will hopefully preserve the majority of yesterday’s changes by the time this is sorted out.

Update 2: We’ve managed to preserve the majority of data for all languages except Japanese. There is still a chance we’ll be able to get it all back, so in the meantime we’ll be leaving the MDC wikis as “read only” (ie: no changes to the db). The logic here is that we’d rather block changes for a few hours rather than lose changes if we manage to revert to a even-more-recent backup of the databases. Again, I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. As it stands all dbs are currently rolled back to their state as of ~6:30p Eastern yesterday, except Japanese which is back to ~4:30a yesterday.

Update 3 (and final): I’ve decided that, unfortunately, we’re going to accept last night’s wiki changes as lost in the main databases. We do have a record of those changes, however, and hopefully I’ll find some kind volunteers on the MDC mailing list to help out with reimplementing those. So, any changes to the MDC wikis made between 6:30p last night and 10:30a this morning (Eastern time) are no longer in the live databases.

As of now the MDC wikis are reopen for editing. Thanks to everyone for your patience, and I’m really sorry we messed this up.

Update (really final): Thanks to Victory, all “lost” data has been restored to the EN wiki. I would also like to thank Aravind, Oremj, Polvi, Nickolay, Callek, and Shaver for all being basically awesome and helping sort out yesterday’s mess.

Bonus points if you can figure out how to fix it. The (currently sort of ugly) CSS are here.

Thanks!

Eric has a very solid background in programming/development as well as technical writing, making him an excellent fit for improving and expanding our developer documentation.

You can find Eric in IRC as “sheppy”.

In addition to the category and topic page work, we have reworked the MDC’s “How to Help” pages, adding a writer’s guide and generally cleaning up the overall structure and organization.

The result of this work is:

• a streamlined set of categories
• a more sensible topic page structure that includes links to discussion forums
• a clearer set of MDC project pages that will (hopefully) make it easier for interested contributors to get involved

Our hope, of course, is that these changes will improve the overall usability and usefulness of the MDC. If you have any comments or suggestions for further improvements, please leave a note here, on our mailing list, or email me privately.

Since then, according to the possibly-wildly-inaccurate stats generated by the wiki software, the English wiki has had over 6300 user accounts created, over 1750 pages of documentation added, over 25,000 edits made, and has served almost 11,000,000 pages.

None of this would have been possible, of course, without the incredible work and dedication of all the MDC volunteers, including writers, editors, admins, localizers, designers, and reviewers. Thank you to everyone who has ever contributed to the project.

First, we’re going to be changing the category system to streamline document organization and to make it easier to find stuff. Second, we’re going to be revamping the various main “topic” pages, again to streamline organization and improve usability. If you’re interested in the details, they’ve been discussed here: summary, full final thread (there were a few earlier threads if you’re interested enough to dig through the archives).

For the most part this will have no impact on users or authors except the categorization system will be a little erratic for the week or two it takes to get the work finished. If you have any questions about this or anything else related to the MDC, please feel free to contact me at deb@mozilla.com, or via the dev-mdc mailing list / mozilla.dev.mdc newsgroup. Thanks.

Update: If you’re interested in helping with the category changes, please come to the #devmo channel on irc.mozilla.org, particularly if you have any questions.

Two “type”-style subcategories we won’t be changing are the Tools and Community subcategories. Those will be left as they are.