When life gives you a sunny beach to live on, make a mojito and go for a swim. Since KDE has an office that all KDE developer are welcome to use in Barcelona I decided to move to Barcelona until I get bored. So far there's an interesting language or two, hot weather to help my fragile head and water polo in the sky. Do drop by next time you're in town.

Barcelona Free Software Users & Hackers are having a Barcelona Free Software Users & Hackers mañana, see you there!

The Konversation team has started porting the application to Frameworks 5 earlier this month, getting things to build and run on top of KDE's next-generation libraries.

Here's all the info you should need to help out.

At this stage of porting there are still hundreds of low-hanging fruit (porting away from deprecated APIs, porting to slightly changed APIs, etc.) that don't require extensive knowledge of either the codebase or even the problem space to tackle, so if you were looking to get your feet wet on Frameworks 5 or KDE development in general, consider chipping in!

In fact, one of the major risks associated with any porting is lowering the quality of the application by reducing functionality or just plain breaking things, and of course we'd like to avoid both. So you can even help out by just running the port and logging the things that don't work on KDE's bug tracker (handy link is on the wiki) as tasks for others to jump on.

We had a fun two hour meeting in #plasma yesterday to decide on the tasks for the next release. It's due out in October and there's plenty of missing features that need to be added before Plasma 5 is ready for the non-geek.

I'll keep things brief, since I'm inbetween KDevelop windows right now: It's out today, and in my mind it took just about nine months to make it. Nine months, now that's a timescale with some cachet.

Back in September, we had this, as best as memory serves:

• A rough initial ramp-up of the freshly-refactored low-level Plasma libraries on top of Qt 5 / Qt Quick 2.
• And on top of a similarly rough-and-in-motion Frameworks 5.
• A Plasma shell application that could render a basic wallpaper (with no config yet).
• A few "test this library API" widgets.
• Very broken and very empty panels.
• And we were still running this inside the old Plasma Desktop 4, since we didn't have kwin yet, or an actual session.

Since then, we:

• Rewrote about 80% of the core Plasma Desktop components from scratch, with significant improvements in some areas (e.g. the tray and notifications).
• Ported the rest over from 4.x, often with significant cleanup and non-trivial changes.
• Created hundreds of new visual assets from scratch.
• Ported many, many support and system integration bits, such as network management, while continuing to make significant improvements to them.
• Kept contributing fixes and features to Qt 5 in a major way.
• Continued porting and modularizing KDE's libraries, and finally shipped them as Frameworks 5.0.
• Not insignificantly, kept up supporting and releasing KDE 4 in parallel (with a major overhaul of the semantic desktop implementation in 4.13).

Kick-ass. It's been an amazingly productive time in the KDE community lately (not just in Plasma and Frameworks - KF5 porting of apps is going on as well!), and we'll be back in just three months with yet more.

Back to KDevelop.

KDE Frameworks 5 is due out today, the most exciting clean-up of libraries KDE has seen in years. Use KDE classes without brining in the rest of kdelibs. Packaging for Kubuntu is almost all green and Rohan should be uploading it to Utopic this week.

Slightly late to the game, Kubuntu now has a Twitter and Facebook account to join the Google+ account. New headlines will go there and we've a fancy account from the nice people at SoDash that makes it easy to interact. Give us a Like or a Tweet.

https://twitter.com/kubuntu

On our Plasma 5 build status page most of the packages are now a pleasing green colour. For the first time today I installed them all and logged in and... it worked!

Ubuntu Online Summit starts today with talks and sessions on all matter of stuff related to Ubuntu. It opens with the highlight of the summit, KDE Frameworks - Libraries for all Qt users a talk about the 50-odd framework libraries KDE is releasing and how they will be useful to all Qt programmers. The excitable David Edmundson introduces the current status and what works well.