Open sourcing Mefi?

June 8, 2001 3:36 PM

Open sourcing Mefi?
I know you were thinking of it, but the rest of us have sites to build on your back... :)
posted by owillis to MetaFilter-Related at 3:36 PM (14 comments total)

I'm not really interested in doing it for a giant list of reasons I don't feel like revisiting now. There are version control issues, feature request issues, forking, sub groups of coders deciding on taking it in different directions, the problem of it being in ColdFusion instead of something more widely available, the reliance on a database backend, etc, etc, etc.

It seriously took me about a week to code the initial version of the MetaFilter which had membership, posting of links, and comments on those links by anyone that showed up to the site and signed up. The guts of it are very, very basic and could be replicated in PHP in a weekend by anyone with a little scripting and sql knowledge.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:59 PM on June 8, 2001

/Oliver recoils in fear at having to do actual work and reluctantly grabs his PHP book. :)
posted by owillis at 4:02 PM on June 8, 2001

owillis, come to PHP. That's right. Don't look back. You'll love it. It'll love you.
posted by hijinx at 6:48 PM on June 8, 2001

You damn right. PHP rocks my world... Hey Matt, I never asked this, but why ColdFusion? MySQL/PHP/Apache run on Windoze....
posted by fooljay at 7:20 PM on June 8, 2001

I love PHP/MySQL almost as much as my mother. My mother makes better pumpkin pie, however.
posted by Hankins at 7:52 PM on June 8, 2001

Don't worry about mathowie, owillis, he's just playing hard to get.

Anyway, you can download the Metafilter source code courtesy of .::SonicX::. who kindly h4x0red it for us by the other night.


posted by lagado at 3:06 AM on June 9, 2001

More here.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:50 PM on June 9, 2001

I love PHP/MySQL almost as much as my mother. My mother makes better pumpkin pie, however.

Yes, but can she spit out 1000 rows from a database and make it purty all in under 4 seconds?

Didn't think so...
posted by fooljay at 3:52 PM on June 9, 2001

fooljay --

Yes, but can she spit out 1000 rows from a database and make it purty all in under 4 seconds?

PHP can do this with ease if it is built as a module to Apache. We were running CF and PHP on identical boxes (Sun U-10s) and PHP kicked CF's butt. We were pulling the data out of Oracle 8i server (another tier) which was storing on-time flight information for every commercial flight in the U.S. We do use a combination of Oracle and MySQL, with Oracle as the large data store and MySQL is an object store for content and some of the site's navigation components. Building a site from Oracle was not pretty, when it was running a handful of nasty queries, so MySQL on the webservers allows the webservers to fly the pages up and letting the Oracle servers handle the grinding.
posted by vanderwal at 2:57 PM on June 10, 2001

Err, Thomas, the "she" in question was not PHP but Hankins mother...
posted by fooljay at 8:59 PM on June 10, 2001

Hiding my head and turning to my "Idiot's guide how to read" books-on-tape again.
posted by vanderwal at 5:10 AM on June 11, 2001

hehe
posted by fooljay at 11:33 AM on June 11, 2001

Hankins' mother can do this with ease if she is built as a module to Apache.
posted by rodii at 11:47 AM on June 11, 2001

Yeah, but then it's tough for her to make pumpkin pie...
posted by fooljay at 8:09 AM on June 15, 2001