Discussion summary: dw-optionalfree? and style suggestions, from #dw

[azurelunatic]

jadelennox and afuna started chatting about what would be desired for the submission of styles for consideration. One of the things under discussion was how people should be notified when someone submitted a style. Email? Support request? Post to dreamscapes? Submit to a back-end area?

I (azurelunatic) wondered if it would be possible to take the suggestions engine and modify it to accept style submissions and post to dreamscapes, private post ready to shove into Bugzilla and all.

Jadelennox mentioned that both the suggestions stuff and this would be very DW-specific. Denise said that the suggestions code was actually very simple: http://hg.dwscoalition.org/dw-nonfree/file/tip/htdocs/site/suggest.bml (and well-commented! jadelennox mentioned; denise put out a plea that if you have to puzzle through old code, please to comment it with the results of your puzzling so the next person will have it easier.)

A small debate ensued over whether style-suggestions should be Dreamwidth-specific or not. On the one hand, other sites might not want to do it that way; on the other hand, Dreamwidth is about openness. Denise was undecided. Jadelennox expressed misgivings about writing nonfree code. afuna proposed a module. I proposed the concept of a "dw-optionalfree", for, as Denise put it: "stuff that we wrote for our site business needs that you *can* use if you want but you'll have to do a lot of customization first", and after further thought, was in favor of a step between "dw-free, plug and play" and "dw-nonfree, closed and you can't use it". something like "hey, this is what we made to serve our business needs, yours might be different".. jadelennox: "ultimately, there's very little code you actually don't WANT to share. But there's a fair amount that is structured around business model."

Denise suspected that mark might be in favor of doing it with hooks instead.

D put out a call for a volunteer to summarize the discussion for dw_dev, and I answered the call first.

Comments

[jadelennox]

So, mirror the suggestions code (or base off it, anyway), put it in dw-free, but call it with hooks? And write the new code to be generalisable, so, for example, if someone were writing suggestions today they'd just use the new dw-free methods called for suggestions in some way, and call it with hooks?

Keep in mind I've not done any hooks coding yet, so I don't even know if that's meaningful, what I just said. :D

[pauamma]

Look at DW::BusinessRules.pm in DW-free (cgi-bin/DW/BusinessRules.pm) for a documented alternative to hooks.