Narya, a Zope/MySQL based Web Forum from Anansi Spaceworks ----------------------------------- We are pleased to announce the first publicly available version ("1.0 pre-alpha") of our Forum product, "Narya", which is now available in the CVS at our SourceForge site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/spacelift Our own deployed instance may also be seen online at: http://www.anansispaceworks.com/Narya Mission Statement ----------------- Narya is meant to meet the goals proposed by the Spacelift project -- to establish a collaborative environment for an open-source based approach to space development projects (but the software may be equally applied to many other tasks: software/hardware technological developments, artwork, fiction, and other humanities, etc -- anywhere where a highly-interactive community wants to work collaboratively on projects). After examining several different technologies and design paradigms, as well as online user behavior, we made the decisions that Narya should be: 1) Centered on a "Web Forum" paradigm. Most of the "human-factors" work is based on this model. 2) Based on Zope/Python. In particular, we want to restrict code to a small set of languages, with an emphasis on Python. This is to facilitate making Narya easy to train developers for. 3) Have a concept of "ephimeral" posts and "permanent" contributions. 4) Have a strong focus on graphics support. This is something of a departure from earlier analysis in which we proposed adapting the existing Sourceforge software, but we are now committed to the Zope-based approach which has allowed very rapid prototyping. The design strategy is to 1) Replicate basic PHP/MySQL forum functionality. 2) Clean up performance issues, to make Narya truly competitive with PHP/MySQL forums. 3) Build up the collaborative contribution types and establish a standard procedure for converting Zope products to Narya contributions (PlugIns). 4) Provide word-processing, graphics, and CAD support and Java-based client-side contribution editing tools. We hope to meet most of these goals by sometime in 2003. Current Status -------------- Clearly Narya does not yet achieve all of our goals -- contributions support is still very primitive, and awaits considerable code rationalization to make it easily extensible (which it clearly must become). However, in its present incarnation, Narya is a functional web forum, using a MySQL store for posts, much like existing PHP/MySQL forums, but with a Zope/Python-product front end. The main distinction is the existence of multiple Topic "Views" in addition to the discussion forum view, which will seem very familiar to users experienced with PHP MySQL forums. Narya also has a more complex model of "user scoring" which goes beyond simply counting posts. Current Issues -------------- Narya is "pre-alpha" and has a number of outstanding issues, for which we'd like to solicit help from anyone interested: * Image resizing ("VarImage"), is handled clumsily, both in terms of accurately handling anti-aliasing and transparency, and in the way images are cached. See: VarImage.py and narya_image_ops.py and comments therein. Actually, there are two complete implementations -- one using PIL and one using ImageMagick. Thus the results of the two can be directly compared. We probably will move towards PIL, since anti-aliasing is now supported in version 1.1.3, but it still appears necessary to use ImageMagick as a fallback. * Installation is still very complicated and not well-enough documented, since we've only done it a few times ourselves. The hardest part is installing all the pre-requisites. We would like to talk to you if you are trying to install the software, and will be glad to answer questions. The results will be incorporated into the INSTALL documents. * Moderator and administrator interfaces are still very incomplete. * Contributions are not separated well. It has been suggested that we should convert to the ZPatterns' PlugIns model to handle these, and we'd like to follow that up. * The code needs some rationalization -- some modules may be extraneous, others perhaps need to be split. Mostly this is for the sake of clarity to potential developers. Contact ------- This is an open source project, and we would appreciate your help and advice. Discussion of Narya is encouraged on the Spacelift list: mailto:spacelift-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net or you can contact us directly at: mailto:narya@anansispaceworks.com You can also discuss Narya on our Narya forum itself: http://www.anansispaceworks.com/Narya/Forum Thank You! Terry Hancock and Rosalyn Hunter Anansi Spaceworks -- ------------------------------------------------------ Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com P.O. Box 60583 Pasadena, CA 91116-6583 ------------------------------------------------------