Articles tagged 'plugins'

Call To Arms Jun 25 2008

So a quick Feather update: we’re now running against the latest stable versions of Merb (0.9.3) and DataMapper (0.9.1), which should make getting Feather up and running even easier. We’re also currently starting work on running against edge Merb, to try and implement merb-slices, so that Feather can be run as a slice within other apps, and so that Feather plugins themselves are slices in their own right. If you’d like to contribute to that effort, there is a “slices” branch for both core, and plugins. Just fork, hack away, and send me a pull request with your changes!

In other news, the official Merb blog is now running the best Merb blog in the world – that’s right, Feather! It’s great to see the blog running Feather, and we hope we can continue to improve it to make it even more useful for the Merb guys to be able to get out important Merb information and articles!

Also, I’ve been through the tickets on the Feather Lighthouse, and setup two milestones – 0.5, and 1.0. The idea is that 0.5 will aim for stability, and getting the work on slices up and running. Milestone 1.0 will be for trying to improve the distribution, setup and configuration of Feather to make it more user friendly.

There are currently a ton of feature requests and small bug fixes outstanding, that I’ve assigned to me on the LH tracker. I’m going to start to try to get through them, but if anyone out there fancies taking any of them on (a lot of them are great little ways to get into Feather development!), then just let me know, and I can re-assign the ticket to you. There’s no deadline on the 0.5 milestone just yet, but the more contributions we can get to knock off some of the outstanding items, the quicker we’ll hit the milestone! Consider this a call to arms :-)

Lastly, big shout out to some of the contributions coming in – after a mammoth merge session the other night, I rolled in great contributions from aflatter, sudothinker, jf, piclez and fujin. Apologies if I missed anyone else – ping me if I did, and I’ll give you the appropriate kudos.

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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!

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