On Tue, May 01, 2007 at 02:12:42PM -0400, Daniel Packer wrote:

Dear Kake and friends,

I'm excited to be working with the OpenGuides source code for a new application I'm developing with Michael Heimbinder (see http://www.habitatmap.org). Thanks for the warm welcome, and as soon as I get my own environment up and running, you'll start to hear more from me. I think the team is fantastic and that's why I thought OG was a great choice.

As for my background, I've been using Perl professionally for ten years with a focus on content management and database driven web applications, so I'm fairly comfortable with the technology being used. I'm also a system administrator. Through my company, X To Infinity, I work on a wide variety of projects by myself and with subcontractors, and I am working to emphasize socially progressive, not for profit, and grassroots work, as I find this work very rewarding and meaningful. For fun I bake vegan cookies, ride my bicycle all over the place, go jogging, play my guitar and sing badly, write articles for local papers, and volunteer.

I may even try to make my own vegan/vegetarian resource with OpenGuides if I have the time. First things first though, I struggled with various installation issues yesterday, and my goal today is to get up and running and detail my installation woes/insights.

Some topics that will likely come up in the near future relating to the habitatmap project are: extending access controls, single sign on (Open ID - LDAP - ?), performance benchmarking, cobranding the look and feel (so that one site can take on many different skins), spam/abuse control, forum integration, and google maps integration.

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the very thorough introduction, and welcome from me. It sounds like we will be able to have a mutually beneficial existence, and I'm really excited to have someone be able to work on the project in this capacity.

I don't know if Kake has mentioned, but we're using trac fairly extensively. It sits at http://dev.openguides.org/. To use it you'll need an account which you can create at http://dev.openguides.org/register.

The outstanding tickets are currently in a bit of a mess, but may give you a few tips about what we've thought about some of these issues in the past. Feel free to add new tickets/modify existing ones, perhaps using a 'habitatmap' keyword.

We want OpenGuides to be extensible, so I'll try to accommodate what you need from us as a development team, and I'm sure Kake will as well.

Cheers,

Dominic.