Announcing new features
We’re very pleased to announce an update to http://crantastic.org/, the community site for R packages. Notable new features include:
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RPX login. This means that you can login/signup with an existing account from Google, Twitter, OpenID, Yahoo!, Flickr, MyOpenID. This makes sure that it is painless to contribute to the site — no signup is required.
There was some initial bugs with this system, but they should be fixed by now. Please try again if you ran into any problems earlier.
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Timelines with recent changes. The main timeline is available right from the front page, with customized ones being available from e.g. user profiles and tags.
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Task View integration: http://crantastic.org/tags.
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Ratings. You can currently rate the package as a whole, or just the documentation. This way package authors could get insight into the quality of their documentation. (Thanks to Peter for suggesting this on our page at UserVoice)!
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Package search.
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Many smaller fixes/changes, including gravatars (profile pictures) for users and package authors.
Please visit the site, rate & review your favourite package, and give us some feedback! If you run into any bugs (e.g. spelling or errors), please report them at GitHub Issues or ship us an e-mail.
Development notes
We have also moved the existing site and infrastructure to a new cloud-based hosting platform for Ruby web applications called Heroku. This means we don’t have to worry about servers any more and the site should run more smoothly. There definitively was some challenges along the way but we think it will pay off. In the process we managed to improve the CRAN interaction - the code is completely rewritten in Ruby. We have released a Ruby gem for parsing DCF files (the format used for describing CRAN packages), as there was no such existing tool for Ruby.
Most of the time so far has been spent on refactoring/robustness and building up an automated test suite. This will pay off by making it easier to provide new features. We’ve got some pretty neat stuff coming up, so stay tuned.
Written by Bjørn Arild Mæland & Hadley Wickham, 23 Jun 2009- Previous: 02 May 2009 » Introducing blog.crantastic.org
- Next: 04 Jul 2009 » Another round of updates