I woke up at 4am with some project ideas. Would anybody be interested in a sprint on the Kotti CMS, a revival of the Linux Gazette webzine, or Q&A oracle like LG's Answer Gang? I also need somebody to help replace a power switch in a desktop PC. The on/off button is flaky, and the case manufacturer sent me a replacement front panel with a new power switch, but I need help installing it because the last time I dealt with a power switch it was gnarly.
So, as many of you know, for several years I was involved with an ezine, Linux Gazette (http://linuxgazette.net/). It was a monthly magazine published by volunteers, started in 1995, and petered out last year. We collected articles about the Linux universe (including Python) and edited them, and we ran an email tech-support service called The Answer Gang, in which volunteers answered Linux questions, and we published the threads in the magazine. More recently, I've been involved in the Pylons and Pyramid web frameworks, and the Kotti content-management system. Kotti is inspired by Plone, built on Pyramid, in alpha, and the developers seem to have a solid understanding of content management and the latest HTML5/CSS/JS whizzbangs. It doesn't have all Plone's features and may never get them, but at this point it's enough for a simple site, and is fully extensible with Python, either to add CMS features, or to add web-application components to a site, or to use Kotti as a library in a larger site. Kotti is also worth studying for its structure, and I'm writing an article about that. Kotti's source is an example of: a Pyramid site, using traversal with SQLAlchemy, polymorphism in SQLAlchemy, self-referential (recursive) tables, database migration, Chameleon templates, an innovative "api" pattern for Pyramid templates that's a collection of helpers, Pyramid authorization, internationalization, etc. The UI is based on Twitter Bootstrap, which contains a base layout, CSS compiler, and small Javascript library, and uses "adaptive" technology to modify the layout for the screen size (desktop, tablet, smartphone). So, this vague project idea would combine several of my interests over the years. Some SeaPIG members may be interested in programming Kotti, and secondarily in Linux content. Some of the old Linux Gazette editors and Answer Gang members may be interested in joining a revival. There are two basic ways to approach this. One, a magazine. Two, a Q&A oracle. I was initially thinking of a magazine, but maybe an oracle would be more exciting to start with. In the original Answer Gang, a leader recruited a pool of volunteers to answer Linux questions. Anybody could submit a question via email to a list. The subscribers were the answerers, and one or more of them would reply if they felt like it. That would often start a discussion which would lead to a multi-faceted answer. The querent received all raw answers. Once a month, an editor would select the "completed" threads and publish them. So, I propose a web-based oracle which would do the equivalent. It would have multiple gangs: "Linux Answer Gang", "Python Answer Gang", and potentially others. The public would submit questions, answerers would answer them, and an editor would collect the monthly ones into an "issue", and make an index of topics (a knowledge base). Potentially the editor role could be automated, with "articles" on the side for human pontificating. The indexing role could also be automated using tags. If anyone is interested in this, we can form a group to explore it. Or if we went with the magazine approach, the existing LG is a Subversion repository with Python-Cheetah scripts generating static HTML from text files. I don't know the last editors or if they're reachable, but if we're getting somewhere I can try to ask them for a copy of the repository and a couple subdomains (maybe new.linuxgazette.net), and maybe some of them would want to participate. There were several Python programmers among them. Then if we get something substantial made, we could ask them to link to it on the LG homepage. (I don't think we should aim to replace the existing LG site at this point. That's something we could discuss after we have a robust site running. I'm also not sure it's worth importing the entire archive and fitting it into the site template. It would be hundreds of megabytes, and many articles have HTML abnormalities and style quirks, since they date back to the early days of the web.) To start a project, we'd need at minimum a Google group (or equivalent) and a wiki. Which raises another issue, wikis in Kotti. I don't think it has a wiki plugin, and I'm not sure if there's a plugin for locking/concurrent editing. So those could be two sprint targets. Or if we're focusing on the oracle or magazine instead, we won't want to waste time making wiki software so we can just use MoinMoin or a Github repository. Anyway, let me know if you'd be interested in one of these areas. -- Mike Orr <[email protected]>
