Opening MeFi development?

July 14, 2000 6:27 AM

Matt: I admittedly don't know much about the development process you use for Meta*, whether it's all you (which is the impression that I get) but have you ever considered opening it up?

More...
posted by cCranium to MetaFilter-related at 6:27 AM (7 comments total)

There's a lot of different feature requests listed here on MetaTalk, and I mean, you're only one guy.

You've got available to you over 1000 web loggers, and many of us have professional experience doing backend desgn and development.

I for one would greatly enjoy contributing to Meta* in a more concrete way.

You've built something wonderful, a clubhouse we all enjoy hanging out at. It's only natural that some of us want to help out. Pick up a new rug, maybe restring the rope ladder or something.
posted by cCranium at 6:29 AM on July 14, 2000

Yeah, there was talk before about this, I was thinking of putting all the code in CVS and letting people download copies of it to mess around with, *but* it's all written in ColdFusion, and very few developers have stepped forward to offer help (actually, a couple people have offered real help like code snippets and advice).

I suppose if I were to rebuild everything from scratch, I would have built everything with the thought of opening it up, like programming everything in modules that were more interchangeable, and document the hell out of everything.

But if you know ColdFusion (the main barrier to anyone helping out), email me and I'd be happy to set something up.
posted by mathowie at 7:58 AM on July 14, 2000

Ah. Yes. Definetely a barrier, for me at least. That's unfortunate. But let me get back to you in a couple of months. :-)
posted by cCranium at 2:47 PM on July 14, 2000

i've said it before and will say it again... this puppy needs porting to PHP!

but that's just me ;)
posted by Sapphireblue at 3:04 PM on July 14, 2000

I was going to respond to this until I realized my response had nothing to do with the actual coding of Meta* itself but rather the potential applications for the technology. So my topic drift is over here for anyone who cares to look at it.

I do think this is a very exciting possibility. I'll be like someone who enjoys football but doesn't know how to play. I'll just watch from the sidelines and see what happens. An ex-girlfriend was going to teach me Cold Fusion, but then we broke up and she moved to Florida. =)
posted by ZachsMind at 8:38 PM on July 15, 2000

I learned a hell of a lot about Perl from looking at the viciously ugly old versions of the Slashdot code, Matt. I'm sure that Metatalk can't be any worse -- even if nobody ever does anything dazzling, having a big project to examine could help people learn ColdFusion.

Not that you're obligated to help us learn scripting languages, but it's a secondary benefit you might not have thought of.
posted by snarkout at 5:59 PM on July 20, 2000

I'm with Michelle on that one, php is religion! Although since you're using cold fusion, I'd take a guess that the site is powered by windows. I've been working on my on phpblog side project, porting my personal weblog to something more distributable/customizable. If you ever deceide to convert, you know where to find me! If anyone wants to give my code a once-over, phpBlog is linked on my site.
posted by tomorama at 12:03 AM on July 21, 2000