BeeSeek Blog

Yesterday Andrea Corbellini, our Developers Team Leader, published the official roadmap for the BeeSeek development.

As you can read in the BeeSeek Development Announces mailing list, you can find the roadmap in the wiki.

Read the official annouce.

As Andrea Corbellini announced in our general mailing list:

Some days ago we had the chance of being interviewed about BeeSeek in
the new Podcast of Launchpad.

Our Community Manager, Andrea Colangelo, spoke about the most
important parts of BeeSeek and about how we use Launchpad for our
project. He was also asked to talk about how it is technically designed
and the way we handle our community. This was a very interesting
interview and this can be a good starting point for who doesn't know the
project well yet.

But let's go to download the Podcast!!!

To listen Andrea's interview and other stuff about the Launchpad project
you can download the audio file (OGG Vorbis) through this page:
http://www.archive.org/download/LaunchpodEpisode4/launchpoad-e4-20080609.ogg

See also the original Launchpad's blog post: http://news.launchpad.net/podcast/launchpod-episode-4-beeseek-open-source-search-engine

We are proud to announce the first birthday of BeeSeek!

BeeSeek recently changed it's teams' structure and you can see a big effect on its "structure" on Launchpad.
Now every part of BeeSeek is an indipendent project and has separated Launchpad homepage, bug-reporting page, blueprints' page, etc.

We had the opportunity to interview Andrea Colangelo (aka warp10) on our IRC channel, #beeseek on irc.freenode.net , to know more about all that stuff. Andrea is the BeeSeek Community Manager and the main promoter of these changes; here is what he told to our "cameras"...

Churli: What is about the teams' reorganization?

warp10: More than reorganizing the teams I would speak about a reorganization of the project in its entirety. To facilitate the contribution in the various components that make up our project, we decided to define precisely the use of the instruments Launchpad make us available, as bug reports and blueprints, for example.

warp10: In this way all the tasks that must be carried out (such as bugs to be resolved and/or new features to be introduced) are on Launchpad, each reported to linked project (eg: hive, the website, drupal, etc...). Who wants to work one of these tasks just has to set it for himself in Launchpad and can begin to work independently, obviously with the help of the whole community if necessary.

Churli: Is not that all this tangle on Launchpad can bring the project to a greater dispersion?

warp10: I really don't think so. Launchpad is a very powerful tool that allows you to create associations between bugs and blueprints and even between different projects, for example when it happens that a bug involving multiple components (for example the blog, the planet and the site together). In addition, its interface is very simple and efficient. The fact that an entire distribution as Ubuntu is produced and managed entirely on Launchpad in all its components, from bug reports to translations, reassures us considerably on the goodness and efficiency of our choice.

warp10: Take for example the bug report, which we use widely. It is possible to scroll through the list of bugs per project, through tags, selecting them for importance or state of progress. Each member of the community and each team can join or assign himself to the bug, and by his personal page is easy to identify bugs that are working. In conclusion, I don't see anything about the risk of being lost in the sea of information that Launchpad offers users, it's just to become a little familiar with its tools and use them efficiently :)

Churli: It was also proposed to use Launchpad teams' membership to manage users' privileges also on other instruments (eg: the Noticeboard).

Churli: What are the ideas about it and how is it going with their eventual implementation?

warp10: The ideas in this regard are many, and I am among the main proponents of this feature.

warp10: Launchpad provides rdf feeds that contain all the data referring to a project or a team. To parse this data is very easy, and this opens for us a wide spectrum of opportunity. For example, I'd love to see a system of automatic authentication on our website (which thanks to the awesome work of jak-o is now based on such a powerful CMS as Drupal), so that to everyone who joined our projects on Launchpad would automatically receive his privileges on Drupal according to the team which it participates.

warp10: For example, bloggers would automatically receive editors' privileges on the blog, wiki's members on the wiki, or, as you mentioned before, all beeseekers have access to the noticeboard and so forth. This opens interesting synergy opportunities and simplifies a lot the administrative work, since each new member acquires "automagically" its privileges.

warp10: In addition, it will be very interesting to implement OpenID in BeeSeek. Launchpad is a provider of the OpenID service, and this feature would make the work much easier. This project has not been started yet, we are still studying about it, but I hope it becomes a reality as soon as possible, I am convinced that it would be a good news for us.

BeeSeek pastebin is the new service is being offered to the community of the free, open source search engine. The advantages are mainly targeted at those who need to discuss the code, allowing them to copy the strings involved and create a page on our website that we can easily share through a simple link of this kind:
http://paste.beeseek.org/#identifier

the BeeSeek Pastebin page.

The advantages are significant for the convenience with which it becomes possible to share any information contained in a text file of our PC, but without having to send in its entirety. In addition you can so not to fill the mail and IRC channels of long texts that would only confuse the readers.

For the main users of the service there is the useful option that strings, variables and all the other typical characteristics of the programming language you are sharing will be highlighted through the use of color, to facilitate better reading. For all those who, instead, are sharing plain text, the "plain text" option will avoid any highlighting.

you can choose almost any language for the syntax highlighting

The use of this service is open for everyone and also for non-BeeSeek-topic texts. To ensure greater cleanliness of the media, its use is permitted without registration, although is encouraged to use a account to ensure the attribution of a paste to his real owner, especially if the topic is correlated with BeeSeek.

This service has just been opened, it would be great to receive your advice and impressions about it.
Try it at: http://paste.beeseek.org

Good news for the BeeSeek community!

We have transferred, in the quest for greater integration between our services, all our sites on a single platform: drupal. It is a CMS that, thanks to its modularity and extreme versatility, made us able to create a portal, wich consists of blog, forum, home and planet, totally integrated with each other.

Changes for users are:

• You need a single account for all the sites
• Logging once you have a session open in all the 4 sections
• Perfect uniformity in graphics and functionality

For members of the new team webmaster, who is responsible for the technical management of the site:

• Ease of adding new features thanks to the significant number of modules on drupal
• Ease of adding new features thanks to the quality and quantity of documentation and API released, that make possible to interact with the main CMS' parts
• Excellent assistance on the official channels: #drupal and #drupal-support on the irc.freenode.net network

Unfortunately, the negative aspects arrive just on one of the most important services to us: the wiki. Used to the excellent moinmoin, CMS developed in python for wikis realization and used with extreme satisfaction since the birth of BeeSeek Wiki itself, we were unable to replace it with drupal. The reasons are to be searched in the low presence in Drupal of wiking features, which don't make us equally satisfied. Of course if someone of you have instead proposals about it, don't hesitate to leave a comment below.

Currently one possibility we have taken in consideration is to create a bridge between databases, at least in the management of users. Even for this solution we are looking for new developers who have the desire and knowledge to perform these tasks.

The characteristics we are looking for the wiki are:

• Formatters
• Syntax highlight
• Sync
• Subscription pages wiki
• Rollback
• Creation of macros, plugin and new formatters
• As well as those typical for wikis

BeeSeek leaves once and for all Italian as project language and is going to switch completely into English. The most perceptible changes will be:

• shutdown of the italian blog
• shutdown of the italian forum
• conversion of the planet into the English language

The discussions contained into the italian forum are going to be checked and perhaps, if important, translated into English. This choice will avoid to waste work and time in constant translations and will make easier to join the project, to find all the needed info and to read all the history of BeeSeek from the beginning apart from the language. Someone could object that in fact the totality of Beeseekers is Italian and there's no need to use another language, but doing this way we hope to welcome new people from all over the world in our project. This changes will be achieved in short time, we hope this will make easier and faster for everyone to work and will help the project growing.

After a long wait, BeeSeek finally manage to get back the official channel #BeeSeek on FreeNode. This permitted to replace our former main channel #beeseek.org with the current one, but the recognition, from the IRC network focused on Open Source projects led up to two other benefits:

• Ownership of all channels which contain "beeseek" in the noun
• Ability to give hostname cloaks

But..what is its an IRC Cloaks?

Cloaks hide the displayed hostname to the people on the network with strings which shows the role of the folks who work on a project, in this case BeeSeek. Joining the team Cloaked BeeSeekers you can ask one and, if the request will be accepted, you will have your hostname covered by one of the cloaks proposed below, on the strength of the team you worked with.

• beeseek/developer/nickname
• beeseek/documentation/nickname
• beeseek/blogger/nickname
• beeseek/artist/nickname
• beeseek/promoter/nickname
• beeseek/webmaster/nickname

The developers' team leader, Andrea Corbellini, just wrote a wiki's page and officially opened the new BeeSeek Noticeboard.

The noticeboard is intended as a place where to leave short notices to inform the community about members' work and as an easy and fast way to follow important update.

Of course only users that are registered on Launchpad and belong to a BeeSeek team are allowed to write in it. This represents the first implementation of the idea to use Launchpad's teams' membership to easily manage users privileges also on the other BeeSeek services.

To know more about how to use the noticeboard, read the wiki's page or come ask us questions on IRC ;)

As you could notice, the last post on the BeeSeek's blog was written really a long time ago.

In this period we have been working mainly underground: a new blog and other new services, developed with the Drupal platform, are coming and there was a big work with the code, so the blog remained a bit out of the priorities.

But now we are ready to come back writing and our purpose is to post at least a small report every one/two days.
Soon we're also going to write more specified posts about the main changes we had in this time.

That's all for now ;)