Mentor

Doug Coleman

Level

Beginning

Skills required

• Knowledge of HTML, CSS
• Graphical design skills
• Databases

Technical outline

There is a blogging application in extra/webapps/blog/. It is far from complete, and new features must be added before it is generally usable. Adding comments is one of the main features it needs, but any of the features from other blogging engines can be considered. Additionally, it needs a better look and feel.

Implementing comments

The first task is to design the database schema for comments. Moderation of comments is probably essential, as is disabling/enabling them. Any other features are optional and can be considered one-by-one as the need arises.

Style sheets

Presentation and design of a blog is important in maintaing the visual interest of the reader. Users should be able to pick from several style sheets or possibly upload their own, though this would be optional.

Feature requests from the community

A blogging engine is an open-ended project. There will probably be more feature requests than the student has time to implement, so tastefulness should be exercised on the part of the student as to which features are necessary and which are not useful or too hard to implement properly in the amount of time given. The student will be forced to make decisions as to the direction they wish to take the project, and freedom to develop the project towards a vision will be granted.

Benefit to the student

The student learns about web design and Factor's web framework.

Benefit to the community

We can stop using Blogger, with all of its limitations, and eat our own dogfood instead.

Challenges

• Tasteful web design balanced with adding new features while keeping the implementation simple