CSL Google Summer of Code project ideas
Our searchable directory of social services mvhub.com is better than (other) social service directories that we know about.
For information about checking it out of cvs see our cvs page
For end-user orriented blurbage on functionality see our software blurbage page
However, mvhub is not supported by a community of developers. We'd like to fix that and we're open to any patches that make it easier for people to send us patches or suggestions.
Easy Installation
The biggest barrier to wider participation, is that mvhub is easily installable only on our servers. At our shell, you just:
cvs checkout mvhub cd mvhub ./install
Untfortunately this doesn't work on a $10 a month web hotel or any standard distribution of GNU/Linux. We'd like people to be able to
apt-get install mvhubor untar a standard tarball into a cgi-bin directory and run a config script.
Doing this work, will require modifying the existing build and install scripts, figuring out how to handle the many CPAN.org libraries and understanding the debian package system.
Unit tests
The existing code base was built by very careful people, who desk-checked every line of code. In 3 years of production, we've come across one bug. If we are to accept code from many people, we need unit tests to verify that new code breaks nothing. Unit tests will require some changes to the code base to make it more testable
Load testing
We have never profiled MVHub code for spots of poor performance. We'd like to do this.
Skins
Layout and markup are done with CSS, but there is no formal mechanism for changing the graphic design of MVHub. We need a well defined mechanism for replacing casscading style sheets and graphic files to create new skins so people using MVHub for their own purposes can have their own look.
Attribution
One way we can improve MVHub is to merge with other directories of social services. To award credit for outreach, it would be helpful to know where each program and agency record originated.
Data exchange
If we succeed in building a community around MVHub code, our next step is to build a community around MVHub data. It would be helpful for MVHub sites to exchange information. We need code for replication of data