Usually we blog about features you can interact with or maybe we spotlight a featured download. Today’s blog is a little different because I am going to be talking about features that you may not immediately notice. There is no new UI for it and it wasn’t glamourous work, but I can tell you that the pay off for SourceForge was huge.
Here at SourceForge we use an open-source ODM (Object Document Mapper) called Ming. Ming sits on top of our mongo database and offers us the features you would find in an ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) on top of SQL. We get validation in both directions, relations, and the ability to interact with our documents as native python objects. This was working great, but performance was an issue, so during PyCon 2012 we decided to start our own mini need-for-speed campaign to get the performance of Ming where we needed it to be. The efforts at PyCon and the following weeks have resulted in our releasing SourceForge on top of a new version of Ming that is much, much faster.
Another feature we’ve recently added to the site is better project recommendations. We’ve partnered with a company that helped us compile a list of data and information about our projects using some machine learning algorithms. Using this data we are able to provide better and more relevant project recommendations. This not only helps our users who browse the site by enriching their experience, it also helps project owners by sending your project higher quality traffic from recommendations, resulting in visitors who are more likely to download, use, and love your project.
Finally, we have updated our sorting and filtering to include a properly weighted and ranked Popularity filter. For this we made some adjustments to our existing Wilson score math, using the lower bound of the … well I won’t go in to full details here, since you can read a very good write-up on sorting by rating on Evan Miller’s blog. Again, this provides a great benefit to both our download users and project owners, by ensuring you are getting the best rated project for your search terms and that your project is being ranked where it should be.
As always, we are working to make SourceForge the best website out there for open source project hosting. We continue to improve both our download and browsing experience as well as our project owner and developer experience. We encourage you to leave us feedback and always love reading suggestions and comments from our users. Our goal is to make SourceForge the best, and you help us do that every day.