[Semanticscuttle-devel] Next tasks for SemanticScuttle

[Christian W. <cw...@cw...>]

Hi all,


I especially welcome Mark Pemberton who volunteered to support us
improving SemanticScuttle by hacking on the code.


Current status
--------------
Until September 2009, Benjamin Huynh-Kim-Bang mostly worked on SC and
Eric Dane committed some patches.
Sept 2009 is the time I started hacking on SC, and released 7 new
versions in the meantime.

The new versions were feature releases as well as security and bugfix
releases. Our latest version, 0.97.1, is mostly stable and partly
unit-tested code. Unfortunately, there are some serious bugs in it (PHP
parse errors/fatal errors) - all of them have been fixed in my
repository on github.

I have also been working on several major changes that are not finished
yet and live in their own branch:
- jQuery: replace the dojo javascript library with jQuery.
- QuickForm: Use PEAR's HTML_QuickForm2 for all forms.

The jquery port ist 90% done, we only miss a library for autocompletion
of tags in the bookmark form. I originally tried to use the FCBKeditor
component and hacked several months on it, but I believe we should
start fresh or get a better one.
It gives us the ability to host the js libs on our own server and
finally get rid of all the javascript warnings we currently get.

The quickform integration would give us the ability to easily secure our
form with i.e. captchas, give us better validation, less code and
better error handling.
I already converated the registriation, login and password forgotten
form to use quickform. Still quite a lot to do here, but I think
it's worth it.

So far about the work that's currently in progress.

Getting a new version 0.97.2 with all the serious bugs fixed out should
be the next task.


The future
----------
There are other things that I'd really like to see in SemanticScuttle
soon:
- Theming capability. Just extract a theme folder in data/templates/
  and you're done. This is relatively easy work since the task is to
  add another folder level below data/templates/, the theme folder name,
  and implement fallbacks to the default template if the theme does not
  ship with the requested file
- OpenID integration. There is a feature request for it, but no work
  has been done yet. I'd use the PEAR OpenId library for it and extend
  the user table with an openid column. Should not be that hard :)
- pubsubhubbub integration to propagate new bookmarks between separate
  SC instances automatically. Imagine your friend does also have a SC
  instance, and you simply subscribe to his bookmarks. As soon as he
  adds a new bookmark, his SC instance notifies the hub which in turn
  notifies your own subscribed SC instance. Your SC imports the
  bookmark and marks it as "owned by $friend". Benefits:
  1. search in your local SC and get find your friend's bookmarks
  2. data get distributed so that they don't get lost easily (backup)
- Make installation easier. I wrote some blog posts about that and hope
  that the arbit installer gets usable soonish.

Apart from that, we need a demo instance on
http://semanticscuttle.sourceforge.net since the .fr address is down.
Proper documentation would also be awesome, and we should decide if we
use the trac instance or the "normal" sourceforge tracker.


Technical details
-----------------
The code is hosted in a SVN repository on sourceforge[0], but I
personally keep my branches on github[1] because I can commit offline
in git.
We have unit tests (based on phpunit) that cover a growing part of the
code. Unfortunately not everything is covered - we would not have so
many bugs - but we're on a good track.


So much for now.


[0] http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=svn&group_id=211356
[1] https://github.com/cweiske/SemanticScuttle

-- 
Regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Christian Weiske

-=≡ Geeking around in the name of science since 1982 ≡=-