Activity Library/Authors

The Sugar Labs Activities allows activity authors to upload their own items.

Contributing your Activity

For a guide on developing your own activity, please visit the [Activity Team | Activity Team].

Once you have developed your activity, create a Sugar Labs Account account.

Upload your activity.

Please, only list application versions and OSes that you have tested with. Do not rely on the ASLO reviewers to find bugs in your activity - it is expected that you have already done extensive testing involving a number of testers before submitting your activity to UMO. Please remember that every user who downloads a Sugar Activity has a link to ASLO in their ?? and therefore ASLO is only suitable for activities which are finished, and polished!

To provide a good user experience, we only allow you to declare compatibility with versions that can be tested. If you include a maxVersion of 5.0, your submission will be rejected.

How to Get Your Activity Reviewed Faster

The popularity of Sugar has led to a significant increase in the number of activities submitted to ASLO for review, and with only a small number of active reviewers, the number of activities in the queue on average is increasing. There are a few ways in which you can speed up this process and make it easier for us, and therefore, faster for you. FIXME

• Comply with these policies. They're only drafts at the moment, but we still enforce them. The most common one people fail on is that your addon must not specify an UpdateUrl. UMO will automatically offer updates to your addon to users when you submit new versions of your addon and we have reviewed them.
• Do not use the ASLO reviewers as beta testers and bug finders. This is not the purpose of reviewers. Please test the activity extensively before submitting.
• If possible, have a public system for reporting and managing bugs in your activity. This is an invaluable resource for us when we are reviewing your activity as it gives us information on any problems in your activity.
• If possible, conduct a beta release cycle from your website every time you want to release a new version of your activity. Allow your current users to be involved, but be sure to warn them that the activity is in beta ;) Conducting a beta cycle will ensure your activity has less bugs and is of a higher quality when you release it and/or release new versions.
• If possible, have a public forum for users to critique, comment on and discuss your activity. If this is not possible or impractical, create a topic on FIXME about your activity - this will group together any comments that users have about your activity and allow reviewers to gather information about your activity more speedily.
• If you are updating your activity, have a changelog. This will inform us what parts of the activity have changed and which parts we especially need to test and give extra scrutiny to.
• If any software is required for your activity, please state this in your submission.
• This is mentioned above, but it's important so I'll mention it again. Only declare compatibility with Sugar versions and operating systems that you have tested with.

Welcome Page

Also known as the Developers Control Panel (or Developers CP), when you enter /developers/ you are prompted to login or create an account.

Main Page

Once you've logged in, you're presented with a brief overview of the activities you've submitted and links to submit more.

User Profile

Each user is able to edit their own profile. Here you specify your name, email, and personal website. By default, your email address is not listed on the end-user website. Administrators are also presented with the ability to manage the permissions level of the user.

A user can be designated as an Administrator, Editor (aka Moderator) or User (aka Developer).

User Manager

An administrator has a list of all users and their permissions. From this screen mass updates are available. There is also a link for creating a new user.

Listings

Available to administrators only, a list of every item can be shown. On the sidebar are links to the Activities List. This shows the name, description, and date last updated. The name is a link to edit each item.

Reviewing procedure

Each submission must be approved by an Editor or Administrator before it is listed on the site. Whether approved or denied, an email is sent to the authors. A comment is required if denied. If approved, the activity is moved to a directory so that it can be replicated across the sugarlabs.org mirrors.

The approval queue contains all of the submitted activities in a chronologic order, but the activities are not always handled in a FIFO/LIFO way. The reviewer just picks an activity and start reviewing. Most activities are reviewed following the main procedure for reviewing activities:

1. Install the activity (and restart the application if needed).
2. Check if the application is still functioning as it should.
3. Briefly ensure that the core functionality of the activity works.
4. Check if the description and version notes are accurate.

Then the activity is approved or denied. If the activity is denied, the reviewer will include comments on why it was denied. Keep in mind that the reviewer try to thoroughly test your activity, but, like any other, they don't have an unlimited amount of time.

If you have questions about the procedure, you could join #sugar on irc.freenode.net. Information about how to get your activity reviewed faster can be found at: #How_to_Get_Your_Activity_Reviewed_Faster.

Creating an Account

To create an account, you must supply a username and password. A confirmation email is sent to your account. A row is inserted into the userprofile table.

Uploading an Item

You begin the process by browsing your hard drive and selecting the activity. This file is then uploaded to a temp directory. It will remain there until it is either approved or denied.

Managing an Existing Activity

Managing an activity is split between several pages. It begins with the item-overview. This shows a summary of all versions. From here you can go to a page to edit the common information (name, description, authors), a page to edit a version (minVer, maxVer, OS supported, release notes), a page to review feedback, and a page to add preview images.

Roles

Editor

• Responsible for testing items in the approval queue
• Responsible for monitoring the comments
• Responsible for adding activity reviews

Administrator

• Responsible for testing items in the approval queue
• Responsible for monitoring the comments
• Responsible for managing the list of applications
• Responsible for managing the list of categories
• Responsible for adding activity reviews

Uploading an Activity

• Click "Add New Activity..."
• Upload the .xo file

At this point, the process varies slightly depending on whether you are an administrator or developer.

As an Administrator

• If the author field defaults to you and you know it is an existing item on the DB, STOP. It means that something has changed