Agylen

I've just written, with the help of one of my coworkers, a couple of small Cocoon components whose purpose in life is to suck in pages from a Confluence wiki via XML-RPC, turn the HTML into well-formed XHTML and spit it out. Putting an XSL-T transformation in front of it allows one to build a Cocoon webapp that uses Confluence as a backend repository, or a small CMS if you dare to call it such. Wiki content can be thus styled at leisure, aggregated with other data sources or manipulated in any way that you like, all without touching Confluence's Velocity-based templates (yick!).

The idea is to start putting a new face to Source.zone and pave the way for adding other features. If I find some time, I'd like to tinker a bit with JavaBB, for example. A forum could be useful. The original Confluence GUI will still be used for editing content in the backend.

Of course, the new face will need to be pretty. Nobody wants to browse web pages that suck. So I need to spend some time this week-end thinking about the best design, which entails a lot of “view-sourcing” around, of course. Suggestions are welcome.

I will also need to find a new logo. Since I have a nephew who is studying design, I think a bit of “nephew art” might be the final result.