Activities Portal: Proposal/suggestion

[Morgan Collett]

I've been thinking about a better portal for downloading activities. I
came up with some ideas, that I unfortunately don't have time to
implement, but I would be happy to cheer someone on if they are
inspired by this...

It should be easy to upload an activity (specifically after the first
time it has been done) - easier than uploading to the wiki.

Activities should be categorised according to various properties, including:
* The usual activity metadata from activity.info
* Descriptions, as in http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities
* Category, as in http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities
* Age ranges the activity is suitable for? (Possibly a Mature category
for Doom?)
* Competencies required: Pre-reading, reading, writing, ...
* Development maturity
  - like sourceforge: planning / pre-alpha / alpha / beta / stable
* Collaborative?
  - yes / no / only (for activities like Connect or Chat that don't
function as a single user activity)
* Requires Internet? (e.g. Gmail)
* Compatible with: Sugar / Glucose version or OLPC release or distro
release... e.g. Sugar >= 0.81
* Additional Dependencies (e.g. video-chat-activity needs extra RPMs
not in a build)
* Tags
* Languages - pulled out of the .xo
* Low power friendly?
* Related activities (for suites or alternatives)
* Screenshot

Activities have Releases, which have status similar to the development
maturity - Suitable for: development / QA / public release etc - and
of course the downloadable bundle for that release...

The site should be internationalisable using standard i18n tools.

Bonus points for:
* Publishing a text page like
http://mock.laptop.org/repos/local.update1/XOS/index.html at
predictable URLs that lists activities compatible with a given
release, for easy downloading with scripts etc.
* Publishing the source in public distributed revision control, to get
easy contributions to code / templates
* Deployment on a system that is monitored and actively sysadmined
* Implementation in a Python web framework, to tap into the existing
developer community :)
* A catchy name...

Future features:
* Download statistics
* Feedback to the author(s)

Regards
Morgan