Cloudron Forum

I'm a cloudron user (new), developer (experienced) and UI designer (in between).

Even in the dead-simple Meemo UI there were a few minor things that didn't quite click with me. Maybe I'll find it's a me problem and not Meemo problem, but fresh eyes on an interface are rare opportunity worth jumping on. I see that the repo is in the cloudron org, so I imagine this is an appropriate enough place to ask.

Before I spend any time digging in:

• Are you open to UI contributions? (I've no problem doing everything from mockups to implementation myself.)
• If so, should I discuss them here or in GH issues?
• Do you have any standards/processes/policies/style guides/design systems/branding guidelines/unexpected specific tech or accessibility reqs/etc for public consumption I should know about before starting?
• Any other relatively low-lift hopes/dreams/considerations for the app I might not have encountered that could/should be added?

-Drew

Signing up for an account, the first paying tier mentions a "total email solution." Digging a deeper, that seems to mean an easily configured mail server that runs as an app where you deploy and you aren't actually providing email service.

Is that right? It's pretty hard to tell.

I want a lightweight text chat client that I can self-host for simple chatting with friends and family. Like, AOL chat room level simple. (did you see there's a project that reverse engineered AOL 3.0 and have a FOSS server for it? )

At first blush, Synapse seems like it would be a good option because I could just direct them to download simple clients, have them register an account and get moving... but going from "hmm, I need a simple chat client for friends and family" to an actual working solution with synapse was like following a treasure map (oh, I just have to enable registration here... wait why won't my terminal reconnect? The logs say what? Well I found the requisite setting in some source file... oh I have to generate tokens manually? Damnit. How do I submit post data with curl again?). Their API is documented but the path from blank slate to working solution is pretty much undocumented. As soon as I thought "I guess I could make a clone of matrix-register in PHP and put it in a LAMP container" I looked at the overall end-user experience it would yield, slapped myself for even considering it (face still hurts), and hit uninstall on the like 3 app's I'd already had to install to try and get it working smoothly. I have no interest in a tinkering project that requires regular multi-step CLI intervention with user interaction— at least not if I can't do it easily from an iPhone web browser or native iOS app.

The administration experiences in Mattermost and Rocketchat are fantastic, but the complete collaboration suite solution feature set is not only more than I need, it would confuse some of my most important users. Some older family members are the sort of people whose Facebook profile picture is them confusedly looking at their phone screen and at least 20% of their posts are misplaced google search terms. It's easy to laugh at, but they want interaction with their great nieces and nephews enough to go WAY outside of their comfort zone— not only do I think that's pretty admirable, but I think it's worth offering a "jitterbug phone" version of online interaction to ease their burden.

I've written VERY simple centralized chat client/server applications before... I know there are probably a million edge cases that make it way more irritating than it seems at the outset, but should I just write it? Am I really looking for some modern version of ejabberd or something like that? Does this seem super niche or would anybody else be interested? Reinventing the wheel is stupid and I'd much rather use an existing solution, but lacking that, I'd much rather spend my time creating a unique tool useful for people to self-deploy than porting a clunky bolt-on bandaid for synapse's missing internal functionality. I noticed there are a lot of German users in here— any tips/libraries/etc. for making internationalization easier at the beginning of a project?

If something does exist but isn't available on Cloudron, I imagine y'all would be open to my at least getting a jump on making a containerized version of it for you?

@luckow Hey that looks like a pretty good candidate. Thanks for the input!

@luckow Ugh— licensing for Blab AX sucks, unfortunately. It allows modifications but literally everything else is restricted.

@marcusquinn I mean, I worked in support for 5 years before I worked in IT for about 7 years before I worked as a web developer for 11 years, and am now transitioning into interface design. I've got a pretty good idea of where the friction will end up being with this user set, and the cost/benefit ratio that will make this too annoying for me to bother with for regular ongoing maintenance. I'd rather put double the effort into maintaining a simple purpose-built tool that might solve this problem for other people than making sure two half-solutions consistently work together well enough for the intended audience.

@jdaviescoates Yeah if I was going to do one myself I'd probably use an XMPP back end. Cloudron doesn't have an existing XMPP server AFAIK but maybe a container with ejabberd and a really simple front end or something like that.

@nebulon Ah, ok— great. It's a neat little tool. Thanks for putting it together and thanks for the quick response.

When I get around to it, I'll dig in and kick off a discussion in an issue if I feel compelled to propose changes. I have no expectations for quick responses and beyond considering my proposals and maybe reviewing a modest PR down the line it should be a light lift.

-Drew