New UI & licencing

[Mads Kiilerich]

On 01/18/2015 03:29 PM, Tymoteusz Jankowski wrote:
>
> I consider rewriting Kallithea's UI with something more up to date.
> Say Twitter bootstrap (MIT licence) or better Polymer Paper Elements 
> (BSD licence).
> Is it possible when licences are different, (Kallithea is GPLv3)?
> What do you think about such change?
>

Hi

That sounds great! Other people have stated similar intent but we 
haven't seen much results in that area yet. There could thus be a risk 
of conflicts in this area. I suggest you make your plans clear, stay in 
touch with us, and try to improve the existing UI incrementally, perhaps 
by planning to do 1-2 week iterations with usable milestones.

Another concern is that we shouldn't end up using different frameworks 
for different parts. It would be ok temporarily, but I would like to 
know with some certainty that we within a short time frame would end up 
with a consistent UI that is better than what we came from.

Kallithea was forked from a system that used Bootstrap. Their backend 
and html/templates was clearly GPL and we could use it in Kallithea. 
Their styling did however not seem to have a legal license and we 
switched that part back to old styling that clearly was GPL but wasn't 
prepared for Bootstrap. I thus disabled the Bootstrap css and tweaked 
the old styling until it kind of worked with the new markup. The markup 
should thus still be somewhat compatible with bootstrap, and the 
Kallithea source still contains a copy of Bootstrap. I noticed recently 
that we still load bootstrap.js but I do not know if we actually use it.

A first milestone could be to load bootstrap.css in root.html and tweak 
our css until it "works" and looks ok. That is probably mainly a 
question of removing stuff from our css.

A next milestone could be to clean things up further by removing as much 
of our css as possible while making sure it still looks ok ... and 
perhaps more like "boring" plain bootstrap.

Another milestone is to move as much explicit styling out of the 
templates as possible. (I do however have this idea of keeping the 
"essential" styling in the templates (or in a base.css). Stuff like 
which elements should be hidden by default (until shown by javascript). 
I don't know if that is feasible and a good idea.)

I guess that would bring us to a point where we quite easily can change 
the actual look of the application. That's where the fun starts ;-)

Both the MIT and the BSD license are compatible with GPL and can be 
included without any problems. See LICENSE.md .

I am not a front-end guy and can't say I really _know_ bootstrap but it 
seems like a good idea. I had not heard about Polymer Paper Elements but 
it seems fine. Similar to AngularJS in being declarative but more of a 
toolkit than a full framework and thus easier to introduce gradually in 
an existing application. I do however not know how widely used it is and 
how long it will stay around. (One issue: We currently try to support 
IE8. I guess that could change, especially considering the current 
browser landscape and Kallithea target audience.)

/Mads