Lenz Grimmer's blog

A bit late in the game, but maybe somebody would be interested in working on this proposed project of mine:

PlanetMySQL currently is merely an aggregator of submitted RSS feeds, with some functionality for filtering content to keep the discussion on topic. Due to its high volume of posts, many gems get "lost in the noise" and are hard to retrieve.

We'd like to expand the functionality of PlanetMySQL significantly to provide more possibilities for community participation and interaction. For this project, we are looking for a talented PHP hacker to set up a site that provides the current functionality and more:

• Voting on articles/blog postings: it must be possible for logged in users to cast a vote on articles, similar to the Perlmonks.org voting system. This would allow providing different RSS feeds, e.g. only articles that have a certain rating and rankings for articles and authors. Positive votes accumulate and increase the "karma" value of the individual author as well as identifying the quality of a particular posting.
• Archiving/Tagging/Searching: it must be possible to add tags to the aggregated blog postings, to ease the searching of older articles and to facilitate the creation up of a searchable "Community Knowledgebase"
• Authentication: User logins must use the same username/password pair as MySQLForge and the rest of the mysql.com web site (to reduce duplication and allow better integration with other parts of MySQL Forge, e.g. the user profile page)
• Optionally, it should be possible to comment/discuss on the aggregated articles directly on the new PlanetMySQL site. These comments should be sent back to the original blog via Trackbacks (if applicable)
• It should be possible to group feeds from multiple, different authors as a "Team Feed", to allow rankings by Team/Group in addition to the ranking of individuals
• The site must provide Unicode support to allow the handling of postings in multiple languages (e.g. Japanese, Chinese)
• New feed submissions should not be subscribed automatically, but rather should be reviewed by a moderation team first (to avoid spam and off-topic feeds)

The implementor should first make an assessment if these new functions should be developed on top of the existing code base, or if it would make sense to rebuild the existing functionality plus the new features on top of an existing PHP Framework (e.g. Drupal, Silverstripe, Symfony or similar). Making use of Web2.0 techniques (AJAX) is encouraged, if it makes the site easier to use and visually appealing.

Please contact me directly (firstname at MySQL.com) or the mailing list, if you are interested in working on this task. Thanks!