On Wed, 19 Sep 2007, Simon Wistow wrote:
SW>1) The package based design
SW>2) No pluggable backend
Wirebird suffers a bit from this, in that I haven't gotten enough into the
finer points of building packages and such. (I keep hoping to add someone
to the project who can fix that sort of thing for me. Along with an
SQL-optimization type person, a Javascript person, a web designer... oh,
and a pony.)
SW>Email::Store was tied closely to Class::DBI which was best of breed at
SW>the time. It would have been nice if it could have pluggable backends so
SW>that you could have used whatever storage engine you wanted -
SW>Class::DBI, DBIx::Class, Data::ObjectDriver even IMAP or a maildir.
Best I've managed there is an SQL phrasebook. You can have any kind of
storage engine you want as long as it's SQL (though really, it wouldn't be
hard to make Wirebird::Resource replaceable. But as with the packages and
pluggables, I've gone for "get it working" before "get it working
*right*".)
SW>3) Always keep a pristine copy of the message around
Yes! I learned the value of that many years ago, and can pull up Phoenyx
inbound messages from... well, from the days of 5 1/4 floppies, if I can
blow enough dust out of the drives to read them and if they haven't
bitrotted. It started out as self-defense for mailing-list maintenance
("UNSUSCIRBE ME NOW!!!111!!! I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS! i'LL REPORT YOU AS A
SPPAMER!!" "Um, here's your signup post, with full headers. Perhaps you're
suggesting your account is compromised? I can help you notify your ISP if
you'd like." Sometimes I miss the days when you could bash the
technically illiterate because they didn't belong on the Internet...)
In any case, it's been invaluable, especially as I experiment with
converting email to HTML. (And worse, already-HTML email to some kind of
standardized HTML.)
SW>4) That said, convert everything to UTF-8
Yeah, I *really* need to work on this. MIME handling, too.
SW>5) Watch your timezones.
I worked for an airline, and quickly learned the benefit of having
everything in GMT. (Epochal time would have been even better. Don't even
get me started on situations when the aircraft could be operating on one
"day" and the crew on another, or different crew members on different
days, or... you get the idea. Or the beginnings of. You have to work
with/for the FAA to appreciate the full horror. And then move to the
banking industry to appreciate the relative sanity of FDIC/FSLIC regs.)
Eventually Wirebird will display in whatever timezone the user prefers,
but right now it's all GMT, and petty humans can just cope. (Or move to
Greenwich, if it really bothers them.)
SW>6) Think of conversations rather than emails
Very much so, yes. The web forum thing enforces this (one thread per page,
not counting long-thread pagination).
SW>It might be worth architecting it as a series of conversations rather
SW>than being email specific. That way later you could add in UseNet for a
SW>Deja News style affair (ok so UseNet is very much like email but there
I have a proto-NNTP server (which works perfectly with XNews, not so much
with less-compliant newsreaders, which is most of them. Make that "a pony
who wants to develop an NNTP server"), because when all is said and done,
I'd prefer to read things via a newsreader. (At one point, XNews was the
only thing tying me to Windows on the desktop.)
SW>are differences) and maybe even more exotic things like blog posts
SW>(which let's face it, with comments, merely an email thread), IM
SW>conversations or SMS.
Yes, to Wirebird a blog is just a discussion group with higher
restrictions on thread-starters ("blog posts") than on replies
("comments"). Slap a bloggish template on it and there's no difference.
IM/SMS (and especially IRC) is still speculative; there's more of a
cultural gap there than I think there is between web forum and mailing
list.
I've also threatened to make Wirebird a wiki, though I haven't yet decided
if the thread-starter is the wiki page and replies are the
discussion/comment threads, or if they're all wiki pages and the reply
structure is the breadcrumb trail. I'm leaning toward the former, since
wiki pages tend toward a less structured document tree. But that's down
the road anyway.
SW>So onto that (the forum/ml idea). I like the idea and it's something
SW>I've toyed around with over the years - give the people who want forums
SW>what they want and the people who want a mailing list what *they* want
SW>and they can be blisfully ignorant of each other (Yahoo! Groups sort of
SW>does this as far as I know).
Sort of, other than their web interface is still amazingly difficult to
use, far more like a mailing list archive than a even a "proper" web
forum. Unless, of course, my suspicions are true and Y! keeps a special
extra-awful web interface around JUST FOR ME and lets other people use one
that actually works. But AFAICT there's no provision for tracking what
you've already read, etc.
SW>I'm interested to see your progress and design ideas.
http://forum.wirebird.com/ is the theoretical home of Wirebird, though
right now we're in the middle of changing hosting services (currently
we're spread across a local ADSL server, a Dreamhost server, *and*
whatever the heck the new hosting service is) and right now it's got the
Phoenyx templates with a faked-up header to match the Phoenyx colors
(www.wirebird.com has the proper colors), so it doesn't have the blog
template in there. Changing servers got interrupted by a round of fall
colds (you don't want me trying to fix templates while on decongestants)
so the email side of things isn't actually up and running over there.
(It'll accept mail (I think; it's a pretty new installation and I might
not have it all set up right yet), but it'll just sit in the folder unless
I get the daemon running over on that server.)
http://forum.phoenyx.net/ is the in-use installation, though I think I'm
the only one actually using it in web forum mode, and new-user
registration is slightly (okay, very) awkward right now... it's kind of
transitional between the old style and the newer "lazy" registration mode
(which attempts to implement a sort of bloggish drive-by-commenting mode),
and because we automatically converted the existing Phoenyx readership
it's not really well tested. (In addition to moving servers, we're also
trying to move house. And like I said, I keep hoping to add someone, or a
lot of someones, to the project, because this is really huge for just one
person. Just a *little* overcommitted here.)
Need to pester my sysadmin (who is not-coincidentally my husband) to
settle on a version-control package and install it so I can have a public
repository. I tried putting the source in TWiki(!) but he didn't take the
hint (he's overcommitted too, since his company just went to Linux on the
desktop and he's dealing with Groupwise (yes, sympathy cards are in
order). Of course, then I'm back to the overcommitment: before I let
anybody else see the code, I'd like to clean the cruft left over from
refactoring, and put in some better documentation, but as long as I'm the
only one on the project, I don't have the time for it. Catch-22.
