Proposals

[James M Snell <ja...@gmail.com>]

Hello,

In addition to the work that Lotus is doing with Roller on it's Lotus
Connections project, the IBM CIO Innovation Lab is currently working on
rolling out a new version of it's intranet blogging environment based on
the Lotus Connections blogging component.  We are adding several
features of our own that we're interested in contributing back to the
Roller base.  Not all of these have been fully implemented yet and we'd
definitely need to execute a code grant before we can contribute the
code but I wanted to at least start the discussion.

 1. Rating system and featured posts - This adds a five-star rating for
all entries.  Only authenticated users can add and modify ratings for
entries.  The ratings are stored in a new DB table called
roller_weblogentry_ratings.  Only full-star ratings are allowed with
averages rounded down to the nearest integer.  The rating is then
factored into a new "Featured Posts" feature that selects posts from a
given timeframe using a non-deterministic algorithm that gives higher
priority to posts that have the highest user ratings and comment counts.
 The algorithm was developed so that obviously popular entries are
highlighted while giving less popular bloggers in the system a chance of
being featured.

 2. Extended blog statistics - primarily for our own internal tracking,
we have developed a suite of extended statistical and utility functions.
 These include:

  * total number of active blogs
  * total number of entries
  * total number of comments
  * total number of users within specific email domains (since our
    email domains represent geographical dispersion, this helps us
    track our growth across various geographies)
  * total number of distinct tags
  * listing of similar tags (e.g. ibm, ibm, rolleratibm, etc)
  * related tags (tags that are used frequently with a specified tag)
  * tracking growth of users/blogs/tags over time
  * listing of related blogs (blogs that use the same tags as a
    specified blog)
  * listing of related entries (entries that use the same tags as
    a specified entry)
  * listing of the most popular entries
  * listing of frequent commenters to a specific blog
  * tracking the "decay" of blogs overtime.  Decay is defined as the
    average rate of blog abandonment.

  There are other stats and I'm likely to add more.  Each of the stats
are available in as graphs in either JSON or CSV format.

3. Blog and User Search -- search for weblogs and users in the system
rather than entries.  The user search piece depends on a "profile
provider" capable of calling out to an external "profile service".  For
our internal stuff, we're using the Lotus Connections profile service
but I'm implementing this piece so that other provider implementations
could be used (e.g. searching an LDAP directory).  I do not plan,
however, to implement any other providers -- at least not in the near term.

4. Apache Abdera-based Atom Publishing Protocol implementation.  I've
got a fully functional and spec-compliant implementation of the Atom
Publishing Protocol based on Apache Abdera up and running.  I know that
Dave already has an implementation in the SVN.  I'd like to contribute
this but I'd understand if y'all didn't want it.

- James