To keep you all (all three of you, hehe) posted on what's going on with bbps development, I'll summarize the work being done in bbps CVS at the moment. Progress is still not incredibly rapid, but hey, we all work or study besides doing work on bbps. We had some fair improvements in bbps 0.7 and I think the improvements in 0.8 will be quite worth while:
Eduardo is working on having bbps fetch the favicons from the pages you bookmark. We think having these favicons show in bbps will improve the way bbps looks. Apart from this, he is also looking for some people to help us out in building some AJAX-enhancements for some parts of bbps. I will stop here and let Eduardo do some elaborating about these subjects himself :)
Chris is working on bugfixes and an i18n-system, amongst others. Everyone interested in i18n'ing bbps: please feel free to contact us, so we can let you know when the i18n system is ready for you to start your translation.Watch this spot for more information about the progress of Chris' work!
And me, well, I am working on a database abstraction layer. Though this sounds l337 and all, it is actually pretty straight-forward. The idea was, that we wanted to eliminate the need for a full-fledged database daemon running on the host system. db_bbps is really not that big, so SQLite is more than enough for bbps to run. Mean, lean bookmarking machine. But, having bbps run on two possible databases makes it relatively easy to have bbps run on more than that. PostgreSQL, Firebird, why not? Still, moving a database from MySQL to SQLite is easy, I've never tried to move from MySQL to PostgreSQL though. And for testing purposes it would be very handy to have a db_bbps in PostgreSQL format... Time to dive in some new matter: time to learn some SQLite and PostgreSQL specific PHP :)
Oh, by the way: you want to help us out? We would be very grateful if someone could help us completing any one (or more) of the following tasks:
- Finding out why bbps craps on Internet Explorer. None of us uses this program, but since not everyone is so lucky as to have a choice in which browser he uses, we are curious as to what bug is causing the alledged rendering problems for bbps in IE. Anyone with information about this is very welcome to contact us!
- It's a long-term goal, but having a Mozilla sidebar component for bbps (probably has to be written in XUL) would rock! If you have skills in this area, if you like the bbps concept and want to help out: drop us a line (or an e-mail for that matter)!
- A Mozilla Firefox searchbar engine plugin or whatever you call 'em. You know, the Googlebar in Firefox, which you can extend with Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves!, Yahoo! and other engines. We would like a bbps plugin for it.
- As a part of the above task: we need a favicon for bbps, the bbps blog and the bbps search plugin for Firefox. Are you good at building icons, have you got ideas on how to picture 'bbps' as a graphic? Drop us a message!
- Do you know how to do AJAX-like stuff? We could use a little favor... Eduardo can fill you in on the details.
But, if you want to contribute in another way (any other way, really), just contact us and we would be happy to have you on board!
