For Google Summer of Code I proposed two projects, however as I can only work on one, I would like to suggest the following project for Season of KDE.

KHelpCenter

It is the application at the heart of KDE’s documentation system and also (ought to be) the central point of support efforts. However it does not do a very good job at it. A rewrite is needed to improve user experience, provide more integrated support solutions and generally make the whole application more worthwhile.

One of the key problems is that currently KHelpCenter does not integrate the many online help resources KDE provides (such as the KDE UserBase).

These days documentation is more than what we include with our software as offline documentation. It is a great base supply of information, but it is limited. So, we are seeing an increase in online documentation, especially since introduction of the KDE Userbase. While online documentation also has limitations, combining it with the existing offline documentation could create something amazing.

But why stop at traditional documentation. Today we are more concerned with finding knowledge at large. It is not really important if we find it in the system documentation or a forum or a mailing list. Ultimately KHelpCenter would help us find knowledge, offline and online from different sources. It should become a gateway for every user to make the most out of their system; find out how to use a specific piece of software, why video in Dragon is laggy and what to do about it, why Gwenview is so awesome, what the most recent version of KTorrent is and where to find it…

The only limit to everyone’s experience of the system is the one we introduce by not helping everyone see the awesome.

To change that we need a renewed more powerful KHelpCenter. Among the possible changes are:

Online content integration

Possibly even of different source types (wikis, forums, forum-like things…)

Reliable search offline and online

A GUI redesign to make it look hot and assist us better in finding what we are looking for

Possibly adding semantic information (ratings?) to online resources

My general vision of a better KHelpCenter is outlined in this post to the KDE Developer mailing list.

More details on the project and what I would imagine the implementation to look like is available in the GSoC proposal.

Interested? Read up on Season of KDE.