As anyone close to me can attest, my life over the past six months or so has revolved consistently around planning for the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo. However, in my abundant free time not reviewing proposals, working with sponsors, and organizing the conference events, I've also been working on a new version of the MySQL Forge platform. In fact, the new code base is almost a complete rewrite from the original one. I'm pretty pleased with the new platform, and Giuseppe and I have been doing a bunch of testing to get things to where they are now. And we'd like your help in the final testing of Forge 2.0 before it hits the mean streets of the Internet.
So, what exactly is new about Forge 2.0? Well, lots of things actually. The old forge code base suffered from a number of problems which the new code base attempts to solve. We've made the new platform a whole lot more interactive and, hopefully, more attractive. Users have the ability to vote, comment, and tag virtually everything on the Forge. There is a new unified commenting system that allows you to "prettify" your comments and highlight code sections in 86 different languages. And a whole lot more.
Commenting, Revisited
One of the things I really wanted was the ability for people to comment on just about anything on the Forge, whether it was a worklog task, a project, a code snippet, whatever. And, I wanted people to not be restricted to how they presented their comments. I wanted the commenter to be able to place code snippets into the comment and get that code highlighted in whatever programming language they wanted, and have the ability to put links, bold and italicize text, cite quotations, too. But, with such ability comes the risk of security holes, XSS attack vectors, and other nasties.
Well, I'm happy to say that the solution I came up with works pretty well and enables people to do most of what they want to do in comments while still being safe for web-server consumption. I used Edward Yang's phenomenal htmlPurifier library to enable clean markup of the comments and the fantastic GeSHi library for programming language syntax highlighting. Together, the two libraries, and a little bit of custom code on my end, work as a great combo to allow users freedom but protect the site and users at the same time.
For those interested in the code that actually does all this, I have written a post about it.
Rock the Vote
There is now the ability to vote on things you like or find important. You can rate projects and code snippets and vote for the worklog tasks that you feel are most important. I believe it is the most important new feature of the Forge. The reason is that, particularly for feature requests that are logged in our public worklog system, there isn't currently a good way of seeing which features the community feels are most important. Feedback from the community is really important to us, and this is a good way of getting that high-level feedback about upcoming features and important bugs.
A New "People" Section
We also wanted the new Forge to be a true community-oriented place for MySQL ecosystem. And so, a new People section now gives Forge users the ability to view and search other MySQL community members. There are lots of plans for the People section, including a kind of integrated "karma" system. Currently, you can view what the Forge user has contributed to the Forge — projects they registered, code snippets they contributed, and forge wiki pages they've edited. Simply click on a Forge user's name anywhere in the Forge and you'll jump to their public profile.
Unified Wiki Login and Looks, Finally
The MySQL Forge uses MediaWiki for it's underlying Wiki. To say that bending MediaWiki to your will is difficult would be the understatement of the year. To be honest, it's been a pain in my *$% over the past six months trying to get it to both conform to the overall style of the main Forge and to plug in the regular MySQL Fo
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