Winter is long in Oslo. This was particularly true for the last winter. In fact, we had a little snowstorm on Tuesday! But I am digressing…
We spent most of winter and the season known as spring in other areas in the world on the newest kid on the block – The Qt Developer Network. Now it’s live. Whew.
And what is the Qt Developer Network, please?
Before Christmas 2008 we took a look at the state of our web sites and agreed that it needed some serious work, we made a 3 year plan.
The Qt Developer Network was in there from the beginning but it wasn’t until the fall of 2009 that we got the time and money to make it a reality. Now we finally have an organized place to collect both internal and external Qt knowledge.
But the Qt Developer Network is not all new, we had some of the pieces scattered around from before. You might have seen the forums right here on Qt Labs. They are in a rather sad state and will be shut down once we open up for registration.
Qt Developer Network features a forum, a wiki, a fully fledged blog, a totally awesome Qt FAQ generated and auto-updated from our support database every night and most of the content that used to live in the developer zone on qt.nokia.com. We implemented a nice system of points and rewards – doesn’t Area 51 Engineer sound charming to you? – which was actually quite fun to come up with. And we strongly believe in fun at work!
This, however, is only the beginning.
We have a somewhat solid roadmap sketched out for the coming months. Apart from a tag engine which is still missing behind the dummy tags all over the site, there will be a group module and Ovi authentication coming soonish.
Looking at the content, we still need to move the books section and the eLearning videos. That will hopefully happen over the coming weeks.
And now, we are looking for your feedback. We have placeholders in our task tracker for requested features and lacking functionality to be implemented as we go along. So, don’t wait – have a look at what we’re building and let us know if we are headed in the right direction.
Hey, I can’t sign up! How am I supposed to test and give feedback?!
Currently, we are in a closed beta testing phase. We have sent out invitations to pre-registered users so we can start with baby-steps. We will not do a Gmail and stay beta for years; we should reach open beta soon and 1.0 should be out this summer.
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12 comments
What a fantastic initiative. I’ve already signed up (for the beta). Hope you choose me.
Could you connect the new forum in both direction with the mailing lists (Qt and WebKit’s one)?
Developers already follow the mailing list, and use filters to get interesting questions. Having the two in sync would give better search in the history of mailing list, and an existing community for the forums.
@Kensai: Thanks, we aim to please. Did get your invitation email?
@Benjamin: That would be the ideal setup, I agree. We had it on our list from the beginning. It turns out however that a proper solution is pretty complicated and all we could come up with were hacks and workarounds. If anyone has something working that builds upon well aged mailing-lists I would be very interested to hear about it.
Hm, tried to login with OpenID and ended on a blank page.
This looks _really_ great. Far superior to the old #@$&#!*$ one. Easier to find things, no broken layout, yet. And hopefully not totally outdated in the future.
@Cornelius: We’re fiddling with this. It’s task tracked already.
@Guido: Thanks! I have high hopes myself…
@Alexandra,
Not yet. Unless you were Casino888 (among some other spam letters I had to delete). :p
No worries, I can wait patiently. After all, it’s not certain I’m chosen for this beta test although I would love to.
@Alexandra
But then, the forums might have the same fate as the current ones? Using a more modern CSS does not help the relevance of the forums.
Personally, I don’t like the idea having one more channel to interact with developers. I would prefer having only mailing list or forum if they cannot be integrated (and I prefer mailing lists since I cannot put filters on a forum…).
You might want to segment the Developer Network even further by geographic location. This allows developers near each other geographically to share ideas and experiences and perhaps even form local groups to meet face to face.
Certainly, the language barrier could be a problem for a very large group that has no geographic barriers (maybe not).
Regardless, this is a great effort from you guys.
@ad5xj The geographic segmentation and other people related features will be coming with the people/groups module. It could also solve issues related to language barriers. Stay tuned!
“Latest from the Qt DevNet Blog”
.. and then right below ..
“Visit the Qt Labs Blog”
Now, which is it? Is Labs going away? And how will we destinguish the “Real Deal” labs stuff (read: from devs to devs, no junk) from the rest of the ..well, easy digestible?
No, labs are not going away. We have different audiences and therefore different blogs. You can choose what fits you best.
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