Since Calligra is geared both towards Office and Artistic suite and since a very good percent of Internet sites are LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) based, isn't it a shame that even if Linux almost rules the web, there are almost no tools/apps to design/build a web page in Linux and you have to use Windows?

I think that there should be a new Web designing/building app created in Calligra both to broaden the suite's targets and because there is no current/decent web design app for Linux and hitting this sweet spot could lift the whole Calligra suite's acceptance and respectability and most certainly, user base.

Some pointers:
1) The app should be both for designing (WYSIWUG) a website that could be easy to get novice users to use AND for building (coding) a website.
2) For the design part, the app could use other reusable parts of Calligra (eg. Karbon parts for designing, Words part for text writing and rendering text on screen)
3) The code part could reuse Kate
4) The app should be able to offer easy to change templates (to attract novices), maybe through get hot new stuff?

What do you think of the idea?
Please state the reason for setting your vote.

What you are asking for is quanta plus coming to KDE SC 4.
See this thread: quanta plus, from kde 3 to kde 4

First we need to see Calligra released and the ground it has lost in terms of some features in applications being made up; then I think it is up to those who want to join the team and put in the work to think about how best to do this.

For example, the LyX team have, rather than writing everything themselves, dramatically improved functionality by extending the code to get other programs to do things and returning the results.

Hy all !

In my opinion, Calligra should do what it does the best : Office and Art tasks. It is probably unecessary to spend a lot of time in a tool that already exists and that will be very hard to maintain.
Furthermore WYSIWIG Html editors produce horrible code because it is a hard task and the best is probably to learn the language.

If you want this kind of editor, you can look at BlueGriffon : http://bluegriffon.org. It is available on Linux, open source, free, and is perhaps the best after Dreamweaver.

To the Calligra team : Keep the good work with Calligra, I'm sure the new release will rock

In theory, sure. In practice, Calligra already has more modules than LibreOffice written more efficiently, yet Libtre is what I use because I can process words in it. What I like about Calligra is that it looks like there's more focus on getting things done than on doing them a certain way, than in the other branch of the fork.

Hi all.
Maybe I didn't elaborate much on the subject.
First of all it was a mistake to use the term WYSIWYG. I should have said live preview instead. I just love DW because I can immediately see the changes when changing things, it is just easier to spot mistakes with the elements highlighting in preview (especially when having more than a dozen of classes and ids).

All in all I was hoping for a web editor in Calligra that could interoperate with all the other apps the way Adobe has done it.
Having that kind of interoperability with any other editor would be also welcome.
I see Quanta 4 is going to take some more time to come front.

On the other hand, having a web building app along with a dev enviroment (Kdev) is also another way to go.

In either case I believe whatever web designing/editing/building app will come out should bridge the gap between web designers and web builders. If we can't have both on a single app, then have two seperate ones, that combine as one.

I hope you get my point.

Web Development tools need to be completely redesigned from scratch.

It needs to have an emphasis on designating divs, their sizes and positions, and so on. None of this "Press button X to insert tag Y" stuff that doesn't work.

I have various ideas for this, but I don't yet know enough about computer programming to actually implement anything. From what I'm thinking, the output HTML would actually look pretty clean, too... But I may be horribly wrong about how easy it'd be to implement correctly.

Point is: I think Calligra SHOULD make an HTML/Web Development editor/application, and they should build it from the ground up as something DIFFERENT to what's already out there.

Tynach wrote:I think Calligra SHOULD make an HTML/Web Development editor/application, and they should build it from the ground up as something DIFFERENT to what's already out there.

Agreed. I don't think web design is less related to arts than drawing, and I think it's more probable you find somebody editing a company's website in an office than someone drawing comics, so I believe that it's even more logical to have a web editor than two drawing programs in an office suite (even if I don't find very logical to have graphic design programs in an office suite).

Manolete wrote:(even if I don't find very logical to have graphic design programs in an office suite).

That why the Calligra developers don't call it an "office suite" anymore...

PS: Regarding the idea of having a web editor in KOffice/Calligra, also take a look at the following discussion: brainstorm.php#idea90281_page1

I think Calligra shoud take a look in its abandoned apps (I mean specially Karbon). It has a very poor development (in contrast with Krita), lacks too much features and we need a great vector app in KDE4. I hope Quanta+ will fit all our needs and I hope it will be released soon.

smls wrote:That why the Calligra developers don't call it an "office suite" anymore...

PS: Regarding the idea of having a web editor in KOffice/Calligra, also take a look at the following discussion: brainstorm.php#idea90281_page1

Name it as you want, but Calligra is LibreOffice's rival. The developers want to make it something more? Well, I think that having a word processor, a presentations' application, a database one, a spreadsheet and all the office programs, and suddenly two drawing apps is rather absurd, but I'm ok if Calligra devs like this tutti frutti suite, as long as the programs work fine and one can install the apps he wants without a lot of code pertaining to other apps he doesn't want. Devs can include a 3D animation program, a music composition one or a put_here_whatever_you_think_is_less_related_with_office_tasks, ok, but a web editor would make at least the same sense, more in my opinion (a real editor, of course, not that hipothetical one based on Words).

I don't think this is a good idea for one reason: calligra is not designed for development, kdevelop is. We already have apps like quanta designed for developing particular sorts of applications built on the kdevelop core, just like apps like words and stage are built on the calligra core. But the calligra core is not designed for development. It is better to a development application on a core suited to that task.

@Manolete

Note that the Calligra team doesn't consist of dozens of developers sitting around bored all day just waiting for ideas about what additional applications users might like to see in Calligra.
They're a rather small team, and (as far as I can tell) most of them have very specific motivations for working on Calligra, like improving a specific Calligra application (like Words, or Krita), because it is important to them (or their employer).

So telling them that you think a completely different application would theoretically make more sense in an office suite than the one they're working on, won't do any good...

What would need to happen for a web design app to be added to Calligra, is new developers stepping up who personally care about having such an app, and have the motivation to make it happen.

However, as I already noted in the other thread, this is unlikely to happen, since almost all web developers nowadays tend to use proper server-based content management systems rather than desktop web editors.
And to develop or extend these content management systems themselves, you don't need an office app, you need an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with support for web languages such as PHP - in the KDE world, that would be KDevelop/Quanta.


PS: Graphics apps are used in work-places... For example, I've used graphics apps (both raster and vector) in the office before, to quickly draw up or retouch technical illustration my boss needed for presentations, etc...
And professional visual artists / designers / digital painters use graphics apps in the office all the time...


PPS: Calligra doesn't have "two drawing programs". It has:
a) Karbon, a vector graphics app, which can be used for example by web designers to create visual design elements for web sites, or designers employed by software companies to create icons or user interface elements, or to design parts of booklets and other printing works, or to create/modify technical drawings, etc.
b) Krita, a digital painting app, which can be used for example by artists employed in the game industry to draw all those pretty cut scenes and character art you see in your favorite video games.
(By the way: All of these things usually tend to happen in an office... )

smls wrote:a) Karbon, a vector graphics app, which can be used for example by web designers to create visual design elements for web sites, or designers employed by software companies to create icons or user interface elements, or to design parts of booklets and other printing works, or to create/modify technical drawings, etc.

Libreoffice has one of these too, it is called "draw". So the only one that calligra has that libreoffice doesn't is krita, and that is more because the underlying calligra framework is suitable for a raster drawing program rather than any workflow-related reason.

TheBlackCat wrote:I don't think this is a good idea for one reason: calligra is not designed for development, kdevelop is.

That's an important nuance: what is web design/development? Is it design or development? If you consider it the first then is obviously more related to a suite which has Krita and Karbon than to a suite with code editors and such. If you think the opposite then a development suite is the right place for a web editor.
MY experience (I don't try to make it universal, of course) is that professional web designers USUALLY don't write code besides some light cleansing (and not the majority of them I'd say). Most professional web design studios I know have their designers on one side and their programmers on the other; the first ones use Dreamweaver, Illustrator (Karbon), Fireworks (Krita?), Photoshop, (equivalent non existent in KDE?), and/or some others; the second ones use their IDE when aditional code in Java, PHP or any of those fancy languages in fashion is needed (not always).

So, I don't try to convince anyone, since I'm aware of the relativity of the points of view, Just wanted to express my opinion, from a graphic design world's POV, taht a web editor is more a design program than a development one. I know KDE devs tend to see things too developer-centric sometimes, so let me "disturb" you a bit just to remember that, as the poet said:
In this treacherous world
nothing is the truth nor a lie,
everything depends on the color
of the crystal through which one sees it


Anyway, as I stated before I'm ok with Calligra devs POV as long as the software works and we can get rid of LOff.