Darshan Upadhyay
CODE 26.04.1 shipped this week, the all-time merge count crossed 3,000, crash testing hit another record low with zero new regressions again, test builds are now available across every major platform, and contributors are making real impact — from SmartArt fixes to build system improvements. Here’s the roundup.
CODE 26.04.1 Is Out
Following last week’s CODE 26.04 release, CODE 26.04.1 shipped this week with further fixes and refinements. For the full feature overview, check out the CODE 26.04 release blog post and the forum announcement.
The team is now following a Red-Green code cycle — alternating between stabilization and feature development weeks to keep quality and momentum in balance.
The Numbers
This week: 321 commits merged by 37 contributors, with 219 open changes in review. All-time since April 2nd: 3,280 commits merged from 65 contributors — crossing the 3,000 merge milestone in just over two months.
GitHub PR migration is nearly complete — down to just 24 open PRs, 17 fewer than last week. Regression issues also dropped to 14, down 3 from the previous week.
Top reviewers this week: Miklos Vajna (70), Caolán McNamara (37), Stephan Bergmann (34), Tomaž Vajngerl (33), Noel Grandin (32), Szymon Kłos (26), Mike Kaganski (21), Darshan Upadhyay (6), Andras Timar (5), Gökay Şatır (5).
A huge thank you to every reviewer on this list — code review is what keeps the project healthy and moving forward.
Crash Testing: 192 and Still Falling
For the second week in a row, crash testing produced zero new regressions. The count dropped from 278 to 192 — down from a peak of 776 just two months ago. This steady, sustained quality work across the team is making a real difference.
Test Builds: Every Platform Covered
One of the most exciting developments this week — Collabora Office test builds are now available across every major platform:
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Flatpak nightlies: collaboraoffice.com/downloads/Collabora-Office-Flatpak-Nightly/ — thanks to Adrià Figuera Puig for building and publishing the nightly repo
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Snap, macOS TestFlight, and Windows Store Preview: collaboraoffice.com/downloads/CODA-Hd7wwbJWxm/
This means anyone can test the latest development builds on Linux (Flatpak, Snap), macOS (TestFlight), or Windows (Store Preview). A big thank you to Adrià and Andras for all the release engineering work behind the scenes — setting up CI for Android and release branches, configuring flatpak nightlies, and getting Collabora Office into the Windows Store. Getting builds into testers’ hands across every platform makes a real difference for quality and community engagement.
SmartArt Gets Better — Thank You, Regina
We’ve been following Regina’s journey — from a forum discussion about SmartArt to active collaboration with Armin Le Grand, to attending TC meetings. This week, she landed her first patch: a SmartArt export fix that corrects how content text nodes are associated with shapes during OOXML export, and fixes a missing mandatory a:bodyPr element that was causing MS Office to request document repair.
Thank you, Regina — this is a meaningful fix that improves SmartArt interoperability for every user. Along the way, she also worked through build setup challenges with help from Caolán, Darshan, and Timur on the forum, which led to improved documentation for everyone. That’s the kind of contribution that multiplies.
The cpo:: Namespace: 1.5 Million Lines
Noel is making progress on the com::sun::star → cpo:: namespace rename announced last week. The scale: a 1.5 million line diff. The team is discussing whether to do it incrementally — perhaps starting with a namespace alias where cpo resolves to com::sun::star, then changing the meaning later. The tracking issue is filed: github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/issues/15927.
CI: Parallel Cypress Enabled for Everyone
The parallel Cypress testing that Caolán and Noel built is now enabled by default — shaving minutes off every CI run. Classical Cypress problems are no longer the main bottleneck. Szymon’s CI monitoring tool is also back online after an API fix.
The team continues working on CI improvements: flatpak nightlies in CI, fuzzer job for the monorepo, and cleaning up remaining GitHub jobs to free disk space.
Ruler Gets Smarter — Tooltips That Actually Help
The ruler just got a lot more user-friendly. Michael Meeks landed a new tooltip system for draggable ruler widgets that makes it immediately obvious what you’re adjusting — no more guessing which handle controls what.
Each tooltip now shows an icon and a live value that updates as you drag. Left margin, right margin, first-line indent, after-text indent — they all get distinct icons matching the sidebar, so you can tell at a glance what you’re looking at. The vertical ruler gets the same treatment, and all values display in centimetres to match the ruler ticks.
Design System: New Icon Compare Tool
Pedro published a new Icon Compare tool on the design system site — making it easy to visually compare icon versions side-by-side. There’s also a companion script in the repo (scripts/icon-before-after.py) for generating comparisons locally.
The UX/UI Design Meeting this week also produced a detailed sidebar-to-notebookbar inventory — Raul catalogued every sidebar component that still needs to be ported or made available in the notebookbar, organized by context (text, image, shape, table, fontwork, formula). This gives contributors a clear map of what UI work remains.
Build Documentation: Write Once, Sync Everywhere
Darshan built an automated README sync workflow — build instructions for Collabora Office (macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, and CODE) now live in the main repo and are automatically synced to the community website. No more maintaining two separate copies of the same documentation.
What Developers Are Building
Vector Rendering: Tomaž continues adding primitives to the JS renderer, backed by tests. He also removed the PNG fallback when saving SVG files into ODF — it’s been long enough that the fallback is no longer needed.
HTML Paste from Dark Mode: Miklos improved Writer HTML paste to preserve background colors — specifically fixing paste from dark-mode Jitsi, where colors were being lost.
Tracked Changes Undo: Attila’s fix for bullet numbering with tracked changes undo is now CI-green, including updated unit tests that previously tested the wrong behavior.
Sectionpages Field Import: Attila implemented importing sectionpages fields as pageCountRange, with proper export back to MS file formats.
Impress Selection Frames: Bayram submitted a patch to show selection frames for multiple selected drawing objects in Impress — improving visual feedback during editing.
PageUp/PageDown in View Mode: Darshan made PageUp/PageDown work in read-only view mode — a small but practical improvement for document navigation.
COOL Extension Documentation: Stephan is working on documentation for the COOL extension framework.
Poco as Standard 3rd-Party Lib: Andras restructured the build so Poco is now built like other third-party engine libraries — cleaner and more consistent.
Build System Exploration: Méven is experimenting with splitting large headers (Log.hpp, Util.hpp) to reduce unnecessary rebuilds, and exploring meson as a potential build system improvement.
The Community in Action
Matrix is buzzing with real technical collaboration every day:
Karthik’s table style bug fix got a public thank-you from Pedro. Samuel Mehrbrodt gave a JSX Introduction TTT talk — recorded and shared on YouTube. A new easy hack was filed to clean up remaining loleaflet references in the codebase — a good first contribution for newcomers.
On the forum, a community member (jacobb) asked for help with WOPI allow-list configuration, and Michael Meeks walked them through the setup step by step. That’s the kind of welcoming support that makes people stick around.
Community Calls
- TC Meeting (June 10) — 10 attendees — CODE 26.04.1 release, crash testing, CI improvements, cpo:: namespace progress, platform test builds
- Collabora Online Weekly Meeting (June 11) — 10 attendees — CODE announcement, PR migration, Red-Green cycle, contributor updates
- UX/UI Design Meeting — sidebar inventory, Icon Compare tool, comments scroll view, contextual tabs
All minutes on the forum under meeting-minutes.
Get Involved
Test builds are now available on every platform. The code is open, the community calls are open, and there’s plenty of work to pick up.
- Try the latest builds: collaboraoffice.com/downloads/CODA-Hd7wwbJWxm/
- Community page: collaboraonline.github.io/post/communicate/
- Design system: collaboraoffice.org/design-system
- Forum: forum.collaboraonline.com
- Chat on Matrix: #cool-dev:matrix.org
- Browse open changes: gerrit.collaboraoffice.com
See you in the code.
