[Server-devel] Edublog notes (was: Re: The road towards xs-0.3 - update)

[Greg Smith (gregmsmi)]

Hi Martin,

You're right we are closer than I thought on first read. Thanks for the
added comments.

I want to minimize the scope but I see feature creep coming so we better
plan for it in advance.

Here are some comments on these:
> - understand a simple level of identity & roles (provided by XS
facilities, as we've discussed)
GS - Agreed.
> - let users blog, tag, etc
> - let users mark entries as draft/public/etc
> - show user's blogs locally
GS - On these three: I want the blog hosted elsewhere. There will only
be two states for a blog post: draft (AKA stored local or maybe on XS)
and Posted (AKA done and sent to blog or sent to teacher for approval).
Maybe that's three, Draft, Posted, and Pending approval. Once "Posted"
all posts will only available on the hosted blog. Perhaps a list of URLs
to previous posts can be stored for the user but the actual blog posts
themselves are only saved at blog hosted site.

 - allow teachers to approve something for publication
GS - Definitely a core requirement.

 - push queued entries to a remote blog
GS - Good point about queuing. We need the right algorithm for retries
if connectivity is intermittent.

On these:
1 - the school is super-connected to the internet, and everybody
publishes _directly_. In that case, we don't need the software - let's
just use blogger.com

GS - We still need the EduBlog SW in this case. The kids can't easily
use blogger.com as it stands now. Problems reported are: User/pass, too
many steps to post, can't find URL and no teacher approval/edit. All
flagged as critical problems by the user. Good BW and target blogger.com
is the use case which first initiated the project.

2 - the school has spotty or no connectivity, and perhaps you want to
run a "local" school blog, not visible for all the world to see.
_Some_ entries are tagged "public to the world" and those get pushed to
blogger.com/drupal/moodle

GS - This is the secondary use case but clearly a critical need. The
intention is to treat it exactly the same as the first but with the
target blog being local to XS or LAN.

Great comments, thanks! I want to find a minimum achievable set of
features that still meets a critical need. Like all successful SW it
will live long beyond my time on it so now is the time to architect it
for extensibility.

I see we need a really good DB data design. I'm not sure that the
current team has that experience. If anyone out there wants to help with
that let me know ASAP.

The replication/queuing posts problem will be a tough one too. Is there
any core XS work planned to handle queuing HTTP or other traffic aimed
at the WAN? I'd like to pass the buck on that :-) but if nothing is
planned we can try something basic like "try three times then wait an
hour and repeat".

I hope we come out of this project with a recipe and key decision points
for build any XS hosted Web App...

Thanks,

Greg S