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    LocalWiki Dips Into Maps, Search, Feeds

    The weather is starting to heat up here in beautiful San Francisco, and so is our software development! Here's an update to give you a sense of what we've been up to for the past month -- and what's coming up.


    Software highlights

    We've worked tirelessly on our new software, and we're starting to see the benefits of all this work and planning. Our goal over the past month was to get the software to a state where our first pilot community could use it to start building out their project and give us feedback about what does and doesn't work. Thankfully, we hit our deadline! Here are some highlights:


    • Maps: Wrapped up the very first draft of our collaborative mapping system. Prepped our mapping system for some exciting things to come.
    • Search: Wrote the first draft of our search system.
    • Editor: Continued much tweaking and improvement of our page editor.
    • Images: Created a sweet image picker/uploader and enabled image versioning, replacement, and reverting.
    • User accounts: Added user creation/login support.
    • Versioning: Added the ability to delete and revert pages.
    • Feeds: Created a basic "Recent Changes" page and added real-time feeds for individual objects (pages, maps, etc.) as well the entire site.
    • Created a rough initial design/look and feel.
    • Continually refactored our code for easier development and reuse.
    • Fixed a bunch of issues, big and small, with our sanity (mostly) intact!

    Developers: Join us!

    If you're a software developer, now is a great time to jump in and get involved. Our development site will explain everything you need to know to get started.

    You can also find us on GitHub. Most importantly, though, you should join our developer mailing list. Things are definitely still very rough, but our code is well-organized, documented and has lots of tests.


    Next steps

    For the next month, we plan to ramp up our general open-source efforts and hopefully get more developers (like you) involved. We'll record and send out a little screencast going over our code organization, etc. -- join the developer mailing list to stay in the loop there!

    Through the hustle and bustle of our code marathon, we had to push back our first pilot selection -- we'll be doing that over the next week.

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