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

[Martin Langhoff]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 11:10 AM, Greg Smith (gregmsmi)
<gregmsmi at cisco.com> wrote:
> I want to minimize the scope but I see feature creep coming so we better
> plan for it in advance.

Me too. I also want to have a solid app with a long-term maintenance plan :-)

Great to hear we aren'to far away... I will snip the many points of
agreement, and focus on the interesting parts...

>> - 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).

As a user, when you are writing the blog entry you need to post and be
able to see a preview and edit. That means that we cannot avoid input
validation, formatting, etc. Also - we cannot avoid some user
management, and database management, however simple.

> 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.

In any case, that has pushed us into a territory that means that we
have to do a lot of the work that forms the core of what a blog is.
That is why I am saying we cannot avoid it, and should be reusing an
existing blog.

If you want to do it the easiest way - take Moodle and customise its
existing blog facility to support

  - teachers can "approve"
  - approved posts are pushed out to a public blog

and you will have plenty of time to spare - which we can use to tweak
moodle a bit :-)

> 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.

I can give you a hand if you first pick a good base to work from (hint, hint!)

> 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".

You can try it on a cron, and if have an exponential backoff. HTTP is
not a queuable protocol - though you could do it over SMTP :-)  -- i
would love to recommend SMTP but it makes things more complex at the
remote service end...

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

My hopes are the same. That's why the first rule is: do not start
developing new sw if you can avoid it. Pick the best preexisting
candidate, configure, tweak, enhance, patch.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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