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SeaMonkey Composer Development Coming Back!

On FOSDEM, I had a quite interesting talk with Kazé, who's doing KompoZer, the continuation of the standalone Nvu website editor. So far, the focus has been mainly on maintaining and fixing the application based on the old Gecko-1.7-based core, with a lot of bug fixes to make it more usable and smaller additions.

Now, Kazé has announced the first alpha for KompoZer 0.8, mainly consisting of a port to Gecko 1.8.1, which makes it come along at least to a version that still gets some kind of security fixes - and apparently more stable, to cite the announcement:
Quote:
"The 0.8a1 version is much more stable than the 0.7.x branch, which was already significantly more stable than Nvu 1.0."

This is good news for all users of that application, for sure.

Even more good news, even for SeaMonkey is coming in another cite from that announcement:
Quote:
"The second step will be to get rid of xpfe and upgrade to the latest Gecko core (1.9.1), possibly by backporting KompoZer to SeaMonkey Composer."

Actually, that was also what we were talking about in Brussels - Kazé thinks that it's probably a good idea to port the KompoZer code "back and forward" to SeaMonkey Composer on Gecko 1.9.1 and create a standalone editor as well as the future version of SeaMonkey Composer from that same code, which would help both of us: Him because he can have his being code based on the most current backend, get that code reviewed and has a chance of getting changes into Gecko and the toolkit, and us for getting new features into Composer and having that part of our suite maintained.

This all isn't final yet, but it looks like it's a good option for both sides and results in a win-win situation. I hope we can move forward with this option and get a modern website editor both as a standalone application and as a part of SeaMonkey.

Update:
One thing I forgot to mention above is that active work on the editor and even more the editor UI probably also will have a third winner: Thunderbird. The HTML mail composer uses parts of the same code and probably can profit from active work on this code as well. :)

Entry written by KaiRo and posted on February 12th, 2009 02:12 | Tags: Composer, KompoZer, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | 5 comments

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  • Comments

    AuthorEntry

    Tony Mechelynck

    from Brussels, Belgium

    quote
    Ah, great, maybe I'll stop feeling like "the only guy too thumb-fingered to do anything useful with the SeaMonkey Composer". (It may be due to the fact that I hardly ever write HTML mail, and that I create my HTML pages using Vim.)
    2009-02-12 03:33

    Jim Battle

    quote
    what about bluegriffon
    I realize that Kompozer continues to make progress, but Daniel Glazman felt it was a dead end. Assuming he keeps working on BlueGriffon, does this move to integrate Komposer preclude adopting BlueGriffon?

    Thanks
    2009-02-12 05:50

    Omnisilver

    from Paris

    quote
    BlueGriffon don't want to backport his code
    Hi,

    KompoZer is based on Mozilla Composer, and Kazé (the developper) want to backport the code to Seamonkey Composer, and so, to the trunk (that's good for Thunderbird too)

    BlueGriffon is write from scratch, and D.Glazman (the developper) don't want to backport his code to the trunk.

    If you understand French, you can read this thread where the two developpers opposate their view : http://www.geckozone.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=69541
    2009-02-13 10:40

    Mark

    from Orlando, FL

    quote
    Blue Griffon
    Yes, I was going to ask what factor Blue Griffon my play in all this?
    2009-02-13 11:23

    jmdesp

    quote
    KompoZer and BlueGriffon
    For those who can read french, I selected below the most interesting parts of the discussion about BlueGriffon/KompoZer :
    http://www.geckozone.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=481847#481847
    http://www.geckozone.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=497201#497201
    http://www.geckozone.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=497247#497247
    http://www.geckozone.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=497345#497345
    http://www.geckozone.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=501846#501846
    http://www.geckozone.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=502236#502236

    I'd like to say that Kazé also stated that he sees KompoZer as a dead end, *but* he is currently involved in continuing to develop it because not doing that leaves everybody with no alternative. But what he sees as the future is more a text editor including wysiwyg features, that a full wysiwyg editor.
    Also, he stated that 100% XUL tools make much more sense (much easier to maintain, and today perfectly acceptable performance wise), so he'd like to move toward that.

    BlueGriffon aims to be based on the latest trunk code, but also to be a complete rewrite as an independent application, no port from old code, so adopting BlueGriffon is not really an option for SeaMonkey/Thunderbird.
    It's also not certain today how well that project is going, there's little info about how it is/will be funded, and one of the dev left Disruptive Innovation and will not have the opportunity to continue working on it directly.
    2009-02-17 15:47

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