[gentoo-dev] Looking for developers for a new 'Planet' web-app

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

As the Planet Gentoo admin (http://planet.gentoo.org), I often get feature 
ideas and requests for ways to enhance the Planet website.

Right now, a python script called "planet" (www.planetplanet.org) powers the 
site. planet is a nice simple script, which is invoked by cron every hour - it 
fetches the weblog content for all the developers it knows about, finds the 
most recent 60 articles, and formats them into a HTML page which is saved to 
an area of disk served up by apache at http://planet.gentoo.org.

planet is a nice system and makes it dead easy to set up a Planet-style 
aggregator. However the feature requests that I am recieving go out of the 
scope of what a simple script can do.

Examples of what people are requesting:
- Ability to browse the 'archives' (i.e. the content which has dropped off the
   end of the page, which planet discards)
- Ability to search the content and the archives
- Ability to browse by Gentoo herd, i.e. view the weblogs of the apache
   maintainers.

I'm seeking people who would be interested in developing and maintaining a 
more dynamic Planet web-application which could handle features such as these.

I hope that this will create a new open-source project (or an effort to extend 
an existing system, if there are any) which would be used to power Planet 
Gentoo in the future, and be easily available for other communities who wish 
to use it.

I envision this being a database-driven application but all implementation 
details will be up to the volunteers who take up the task :)
Unfortunately I don't have time to get heavily involved with the development, 
but I will "oversee" the project.

This is open to everyone (not only Gentoo developers...) - infact I'd like to 
see this bringing a few more people into Gentoo development.

If you are interested, please send me an email (dsd@g.o) with the 
following info:

  1. Your preferred web development languages/platforms/etc.
  2. Other languages/platforms you would be prepared to work with should the
     majority of other volunteers wish to work with those instead.
  3. Your previous experience developing web-applications and working with
     related software (don't worry if this isn't much).
  4. Any experience you have with blogs/aggregation/RSS/...

Feel free to spam me with related ideas/comments if you have any :)

Thanks,
Daniel
-- 
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list