[Nms-cgi-devel] Re: NMS and Google SoC

[Jonathan S. <jn...@ge...>]

On Wed, 2006-04-19 at 09:24, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 08:57:09AM +0100, Jonathan Stowe wrote:

<on getting a summer of code student to do something for NMS>

> > I could certainly write a specification for it.
> 
> If you could, that would be cool.

As promised. It's fairly high level but enough to get someone started. 
I have copied in the developers list in case a) there are any students
lurking on this list who might want to apply for a summer of code gig b)
we don't get the 'minion' and someone fancies doing some work on it c)
someone wants to add something.

<begin>

BACKGROUND 
==========

The NMS project was started in 2000 with the aim of providing high
quality
and secure replacements for popular Perl programs used on the web and
to provide the best support possible for those replacement programs.

More information on the project in general can be found at:

    http://nms-cgi.sf.net/

The initial development work on the replacement programs is now largely
completed and the programs are considered to be in 'maintenance mode'.

PHASE 2 OF THE PROJECT 
======================

The programs released by the NMS project have been required to be
largely
compatible with the programs that they are replacing in the sense that
for the most part they can be offered as drop in replacements and that
the
configuration should be familiar to someone who knows the older
programs;
however this imposes a limitation on the ability to provide for many
feature requests or to implement more sophisticated security features.

With this in mind the 'phase two' of the NMS project is to provide
entirely new programs without any of the legacy constraints and which
can provide a far greater degree of functionality simply through their
configuration rather than by customization. To date the only output from
this effort has been the program 'TFmail' which is the recommended 
replacement for the 'FormMail' program (and to some extent also the
guestbook program.) 

Going forward the plan is to create a "Web Application Toolkit" that
draws on the work already begun with TFmail. This should provide a
wide variety of functionality without any programming knowledge on the
part of the person configuring it, and it should be simply installed 
on the majority of shared web hosting that supports Perl CGI programs
(the current NMS constraints are discussed at

     http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/about.html
)

The functionality provided should incorporate everything already
available in the TFmail program but will also have features to 
support configuration (at minimum) as:

          * Guestbook 
          * Web Discussion Board
          * Content Search 
          * Link Exchange 

or any combination of the features of those. Extended features that
will be common to all of these that may be needed include:

          * Authentication
          * Rate limiting of requests
          * Session management
          * Secure file handling
          * Generalized and flexible error reporting
          * Message threading
          * Improved templating engine

The intent being to support as wide as possible range of relatively
simple web applications through a single set of program and library
files simply through individual configuration and template files.

The resulting package should have user level documentation that will
enable someone with little more experience than creating HTML pages
to be able to configure the applications as quickly as possible
including examples of configuration for the most common uses.




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