Hoopla

As part of the Upstart Hoopla! project I’ve started programming in Ruby, specifically using RubyOnRails(RoR). RoR an interesting programming language/framwork that is obviously the darling of the industry at the moment.
Its easy to see why… RoR cuts through so much of the redtape that’s associated with frameworks such as J2EE, or even .Net. The Ruby language itself is bit tougher to get to grips with. It has some mannerism that can be currently best described as strange, compared to the stuff I’m used to, i.e. Python & Java. I say “currently” because I’m still learning these mannerisms and fromwhat I’ve read its supposed to be an amazing programming language, once the penny drosp.
Upstart Hoopla is at the time of this writing a blog using the Typo blogging engine (as is this site I might add). I’ve chosen the Typo engine as the foundation for the Upstart project because the code’s in excellent shape and is relatively easy to manipulate into the functonality required for the project.
Hence I’m forking the Typo engine into the Hoopla engine so that it may provide amongst other things:

• multiple-user signon and registration
• ‘related article’ functionality
• relevance-based browsing of tags via user-profiles and a snazzy UI
• podcast-hosting via Amazon S3

Once these features are made available and have proven to be robust, I’m considering republishing under the same open source license as the Typo engine. The other option is to get in touch with the Typo development team and suggest introducing the additional Hoopla functionality as add-ons or plugins.