I've upgraded our demo site at
http://jeffreymcmanus.com/forum/ to the
latest version of the code, which we'll call 0.9.1.
This version has most of the feature functionality that we've planned
for our first open-source release.
The big feature addition in this release is the notion of ideas and
voting. If you have a look at the main ideas page it should be clear
what this is all about:
http://jeffreymcmanus.com/forum/ideas/
If you're logged in you can submit ideas and vote on the ideas that
are there. Admins can create idea categories as a way to group ideas.
Also new in this release is support for rev=canonical shorter URLs for
stories. The rev=canonical thing has sort of swooped in out of nowhere
as a distributed solution to the problem of URL-shortening sites (like
tinyurl,
tr.im, etc.) becoming unavailable and breaking the web. It
was easy to implement, so I went ahead and did it, and it looks like
it's working well. If you want to see how this works, you can play
along at home thusly:
1) Install Simon's "Shorten" bookmarker by dragging it from this page
to your browser toolbar:
http://simonwillison.net/2009/Apr/11/revcanonical/
2) Go to any story page (such as
http://jeffreymcmanus.com/forum/stories/view/little-luxuries)
and click on the Shorten bookmarker. You should be able to see a
somewhat more compact URL for that page (in this case, it's
http://jeffreymcmanus.com/forum/s/xKEt9vyeLfMJE).
I've got a few more things to polish up for this release -- need to
paginate ideas and provide admins the ability to edit/delete them. But
we're looking good for a release this week.
Jeffrey