Announcing: Feather Apr 26 2008

So after a few weeks of teaser posts, we’ve finally opened up the code on the software that powers this very blog, Feather. It’s been a collaborative effort so far between me and my boy Mike, but now it’s time to open source it, and hopefully people besides us will not only find a use for it, but will also find new ways to extend and improve it.

So what’s in the current codebase? As alluded to before, the core itself is lightweight. Basic article posting, and user management is all you’re really getting. The beauty is in the wide variety of plugins that are (and will be) available to extend the software further. Within a separate plugins repository, there are currently twelve plugins, that extend Feather to provide comments for articles, feeds, formatters for article content (Textile and Markdown), basic RSS importing for articles and comments, integration with ping services, the ability to setup hard-coded redirects on your site, sidebar and snippet content, overridden css styles, tagging, Twitter integration (to display your tweets in line with blog posts), and file uploads. The code in core and for these plugins probably isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough to power a few blogs already - and improvement is where you come in.

If you’ve got an idea for a new plugin, improvements to existing functionality, or you’ve found a bug, then by all means fork the project on GitHub, implement your code, and send us a pull request so we can merge the changes into the main trunk. Alternatively, send us your patch via e-mail, and we’ll look to include it within the application. If you submit two patches to either feather, or feather-plugins, then you’ll be given commit access to the repository in question, and will effectively become part of the core team. So what needs doing right away?

The biggest deficiency at the minute are specs - there are some specs in the core code, but it doesn’t cover a lot of the application, and ideally we’d be aiming for 100% coverage of the core controllers and models. We then need to devise a decent way of similarly shipping specs with plugins. When we start updating and improving plugins, we’ll need a way of handling data migrations smoothly and efficiently. On top of this, there are still outstanding useful plugins that need to be written, such as content search, and trackbacks, as well as integration with services other than Twitter. Lastly, there are bound to be bugs, so roll up your sleeves and fix them, it’ll be much appreciated!

We’ll be rolling out a Feather website soon, along with an official plugin directory to make installing plugins easier - for now, there’s a basic getting started page on the wiki over at GitHub, and there will be more information over the coming days on both mine and Mike’s blog. Any questions in the meantime, then let me know.

Other than that, what are you waiting for? Get your Feather on!

bloggingfeathermerbmikepluginsruby