Working Toward Open-Source

Just a little status update on what I’m doing:

I’ve been working for a couple months on re-programming the haiku site from the ground up. There’s several reasons for a complete rework. One of them is that I wouldn’t really feel comfortable releasing that old hacked together code as open source alongside our beautiful OS code. The other is that because I was writing it so fast, I’m sure there’s some security exploits that people could find if they had the code.

Anyway, the new basis for the backend of the site is nearly done. If anyone wants to see it, post here and I’ll put up a link, but no sense in throwing up a link to my home comp if no one’s going to DL it.

And, since it’s been done from the beginning with the knowledge that it’s going to be open sourced and available to be highly criticized, I think that has made me generate some of my best work to date. Again, it’s far from a “website-in-a-box” package, but building a site off of it would be fairly trivial.

kurtis wrote:
Just a little status update on what I'm doing:

I’ve been working for a couple months on re-programming the haiku site from the ground up. There’s several reasons for a complete rework. One of them is that I wouldn’t really feel comfortable releasing that old hacked together code as open source alongside our beautiful OS code. The other is that because I was writing it so fast, I’m sure there’s some security exploits that people could find if they had the code.

Anyway, the new basis for the backend of the site is nearly done. If anyone wants to see it, post here and I’ll put up a link, but no sense in throwing up a link to my home comp if no one’s going to DL it.

And, since it’s been done from the beginning with the knowledge that it’s going to be open sourced and available to be highly criticized, I think that has made me generate some of my best work to date. Again, it’s far from a “website-in-a-box” package, but building a site off of it would be fairly trivial.

I would be interested.

kurtis wrote:
If anyone wants to see it, post here and I'll put up a link...

Of course we want to see it! :wink:

here’s the latest build as of monday:
build 11

kurtis wrote:
here's the latest build as of monday: build 11

It’s looking good - is the hope that this will be submitted into the Haiku svn ?
Is it getting an MIT licence aswell ?

I was wondering if a cache-ing module would be useful, then I thought about management.
For all the people watching Haiku who can’t program C, but have some experience with PHP, would you care to list some features you intend (but low priority) to add into the site, but havent got around to ?

John

[Beta wrote:
"]It's looking good - is the hope that this will be submitted into the Haiku svn ? Is it getting an MIT licence aswell ?

I was wondering if a cache-ing module would be useful, then I thought about management.
For all the people watching Haiku who can’t program C, but have some experience with PHP, would you care to list some features you intend (but low priority) to add into the site, but havent got around to ?

I haven’t decided the license yet, but it will be on the haiku svn when I think it’s ready for a release (or close to it), which hopefully will be in a week or two.

There is actually a caching module on the current haiku backend, but I’ve found its performance to be less than helpful. I took a lot of cues from PHP software and methods that have been tried and true. If you look at these boards, phpbb, there is no caching, and during every page load it reads the template files off the disk rather than caching them in the database. Check out http://www.big-boards.com/.

Some features I was planning on adding:

  • Full user/groups permissions scheme, which will probably get done this weekend.

  • When I get them done, I will add some basic example pages, such as logging in and some administration pages. There will also be the templates for those pages.

  • I am going to move all the Database queries into one library, ie move them all to mysql.h.php for the mysql layer. I’ll throw each query in a function. This will become extremely useful as mysql moves more toward a full-featured database (like oracle or postgresql) and we can store the queries as procedures in the actual database.

  • I am also going to write a replacement user library that will allow users to log in using information from a phpbb install, as well as assign phpbb groups permissions, etc. This is more so people don’t have to remember multiple passwords. This library won’t actually load any phpbb code.

I got a bit distracted with trying my hand in xhtml/css, so no real coding updates this week. I’m going to be busy the rest of the weekend, but hopefully by next weekend I’ll have the users/groups system finalized and some examples of how to use them.

I have an svn repository (not on haiku’s svn server) set up for the new haiku site that I am working on. You can find it here:
http://projects.kopfhaus.net/svn/haiku-web

After a phone conversation I had with Michael the other night though about the direction he would like to see the site go, I am debating weather or not to use my code at all. The direction he would like to see the main site go to is more toward a wiki format, which I could certainly write a small wiki library to use my code, but I may look into prepackaged wiki systems and then just write extensions to house our old news, newsletters, and so on.