GSoC Plan for Agora

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

Hey, Ahsan. Sorry it's taken a while for me to sit down and think
clearly about this. We need a good plan for you to work on Agora.

First of all, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe I have seen
you start a blog about your progress. Can you please rectify this and
blog at least once a week?

Let us think about the tasks you proposed:

    1. Development of a discussion forum where people post their
       problems and can get help from the community.

    2. Development of a section to help creation of documentation of
       the Octave.

    3. Improvements to current bundle system handling and a whole
       section of example code.

    4. A tutorial section.

    5. Merging of FAQs and general help into the Agora system.

    6. Other remaining to-dos in the clone readme file.

I will go over each of those in turn.

    1. The discussion forum is certainly important. Ideally, I would
       like something like every page having its own comment section
       (e.g. snippets, bundles...)

    2. I'm not sure what you envision for documentation. We already
       have a wiki ( http://wiki.octave.org ). What more do users need
       for creating documentation?

    3. This is the most important thing. This is Agora's raison
       d'être. We want this actually working. I would prefer if your
       prioritised working on this.

    4. How is this different from 2? Do you mean some way for people
       to upload tutorials? Do you think you can think of an interface
       that will make it easier for people to upload tutorials than
       what we have in the wiki?

    5. Whoa. Wait. You want to move all of the documentation into
    Agora? No more separate Octave wiki?

    6. Those are nice, but not as important. Let's leave those to the
       end if there is still time. For anyone else following along,
       this are the current contents of the README file:

           http://inversethought.com/hg/agora/file/1eb652aa501a/README#l46

       It seems to me that the only important outstanding things there
       are a ranking system.

Additionally, our current Agora installation has an obscure bug that
is making some pages unusable, a bug that doesn't express itself in a
standalone test installation. We'll need careful webserver
sysadminning to track it down.

So, Ahsan, I would like to propose the following two goals for your
midterm, in this order:

   * Completely hide snippets from non logged-in users (you've already
     done this)

   * Implement the comment system

   * Figure out how to re-run celery on bundles that haven't been
     processed

   * (optional) Implement a ranking system for snippets and bundles.

I think this is a clear set of goals, with a clear indication if
they've been fulfilled or not.

The following tasks seem more complicated to me, and should be done
post-midterm:

   * Work with me in the server so we can track down why snippets are
     erroring out.

   * Figure out a non-intrusive anti-spam mechanism (no captchas) to
     cull snippet spam.

   * Implement a path for importing/exporting bundles to and from
     Octave-Forge or Mercurial repositories.

Please blog about your progress as you work on this.

Finally, remember that we have Wendy to help us figure out things.
Have you contacted her yet? I have CC'ed her in this email.

- Jordi G. H.