Ideastrike: Recap

20 January, 2012

A bit of a chaotic weekend, but it finally came together and we have another project to unveil.

Ideastrike - which we will switch to once it has the features we require to replace our existing site - is a web application for suggesting, discussing, planning and executing project ideas.

Curent Features

So what did we get done in a week?

• The website uses NancyFx - a super-duper-happy-path web framework running on ASP.NET (also runs in other places).
• User authentication is done via Janrain which means users don't need to create new accounts, and administrators don't need to manage accounts either.
• Markdown support just about everywhere on the site. If you have space for more than a sentence, we've added Markdown support. And a preview mode too, using Showdown.
• Twitter Bootstrap has been used as the baseline for our site theme.
• Image Uploading using the jQuery File Upload plugin - attach files to an idea.
• Oh, and running on AppHarbor right now. I wish I had more screenshots of the testing from earlier today - here's something more recent.

Note: this is a non-production environment and will be treated as such by us in the short-term. Any ideas you want to keep for posterity should go on our Uservoice site, not on AppHarbor. We will let you know when that's ready to go.

Fun stats

We had 14 separate contributors this week and 50 pull requests accepted - our busiest week so far.

The punch card graph over at GitHub this week also tells a story.

What's Next?

While we're proud to have a working site going, we're not tying this one off just yet. We've got a number of things to add which are sitting on the Trello board, just waiting, nay, begging for some love.

• Github and Trello integration - we've started on the UI for this, but we want the activity feed to come alive as the idea evolves and progresses from concept to code.
• API and Client libraries - so that app developers can integrate with Ideastrike directly.
• A more dynamic web experience - we're using Mustache.js already for the activity feed, and we've only scratched the surface of what you can do with JSON data and client-side templates.
• Database improvements - using the shiny new EF 4.3 Migrations to update the schema and persist data.

What can I do to help?

Interested in contributing?

• Test out the site on AppHarbor and log issues on Github.
• Fork the code on GitHub and send us a pull request for something you'd like to add.
• Suggest a feature on the Trello backlog.
• Drop into the JabbR chatroom if you're not sure where to start. Of if you'd just like to chat.

And we'll wrap up this week's post with another meme that was unearthed this weekend in JabbR.

Thanks to @NickJosevski for some hilarity.