Playing With Sharp Objects

The MonkeyChow Roadmap

Based on conversations I’ve had with a few former users of the original FoF and another FOF project, FOF-redux, here is the near future roadmap for Monkeychow.

• Internationalization. We have translators for Spanish (myself) and French (Andrew Arensburger of ooblick.com), but to provide real widespread use of the software, we need a lot more. I will be providing messages.po and message.mo files for locale “en_US” in v38 in SVN that anyone can use to submit similar files for their language. After we have about 5 languages in there, I’ll do another full release of the code to get the ball rolling for general users. For details on internationalization in PHP using gettext, see here. Please volunteer so I don’t have to resort to Babelfish!
• OPML filtering by tag. Send feed lists to people based only on the currently viewed tag. Not a high priority item, but handy.
• Merge the frames and non-frames code to reduce code redundancy. (DRY) The duplicate coding for panel and frames view should never have been done that way.
• Some sort of skinning and CSS revamp, maybe as part of a new preferences panel. The current look is very minimalist, but it’s not for everyone so we need to make “pretty” an option to bring more users into the fold. At the same time, I’d like to reduce the clutter and some inefficient use of space. Andrew Arensburger has been submitting code in this area. This goes in hand with the code merge, so we may even want to merge the two altogether and have a preferences field determine how much of the interface shows.
• Preferences leads right into multiple users. By adding multiple users this can become more of a social service that anyone can install, allowing you to let a circle of friends join (invites?) or let anyone read feeds off your lists. If anyone has ideas about how the database might be revamped to support multiple users and keep track of what they individually have read, I welcome your advise.
• AJAX effects like live search and collapsable article fields. I don’t want to make it too heavy, but that can really help with the look and feel of the tool.
• Provide an easy self-contained way of using this with Cygwin apache to provide an easy to install desktop version for Windows users.

I don’t really have any set dates for this, but that is the order we’ll be putting our efforts into. Please comment here or email me if you have any additional suggestions.