A few weeks ago, the free bulletin board site, SpreeBB.com, went down ... taking down Tabulas' boards. Oops. The joys of the hosted models...

So anyways, being on a dev kick this weekend, I decided to install phpBB3 and do a tight account integration with Tabulas: signing up for Tabulas would give you a phpBB accounts; and updating your account information on Tabulas would also update phpBB. And guess what? A couple hours later: done.

One thing I've been loving in OS software are programmatic hooks. It's a very basic concept, but it's incredibly powerful when you're hooking up functionality across different pieces of software. I decided to add programmatic hooks for Tabulas to help facilitate the phpBB integration (Tabulas' codebase is rather large and unwieldy - moving more of my stuff to programmatic hooks can help keep the core light and simple.

The next step for Tabulas is to take these programmatic hooks and let them be URLs - there's no reason a programmatic hook has to be a local function - it could also POST to a URL - this is how "plugins" for hosted sites like Tabulas could work.

A big inspiration for my recent obsession with hooks comes from my recent WordPress plugin, as well as my initial inspection of the Drupal hooks (there's no reason you could layer Deki underneath all of Drupal). We desperately need hooks in Deki, both in the front-end as well as the API - we're awesome at pulling data in, but we suck at pushing data out.

Last week, stressing over my "work to do" on Sunday night kept me up for my first all-night since college (I think). Anyways, tonight I'll nip it pre-emptively in the bud by listing my work items this week at work:

• Driving the iPhone-specific user interface for interacting with content inside Deki, built on top of Deki's API
• Stabilizing the never-released Deuce skin (yay for UI work!)
• More dev work on our control panel for the Kilen Woods release
• Start the massive upgrade script to switch Deki's file schema and local storage (this is gonna be hairy)
  
• Releasing the WordPress plugin
• Pulling together a minor release for 8.05.2 which was the result of some idiotic checkins of mine (oops)
  
• Wik.is postmortem (we did a twelve-hour upgrade to the latest release of Deki, and it's becoming clear that our upgrade strategy needs to re-examined; but this will probably require more infrastructure changes)
• Cleaning up our internal technical wiki

My non-MindTouch project goals this week:

• Continue with the raeviews mockups and UI flow
• Change the crossposting to be hooks
• Add custom WordPress installs as a crossposting option
• Add Tabulas support for Deki federation :)