ANN: Pocoo (bulletin board software) 0.1 beta released

[Georg Brandl]

We're pleased to announce that

Pocoo 0.1 (beta) was released today (Sept. 10, 2006).

Pocoo <http://www.pocoo.org/> is a bulletin board software (aka. message board)
written in Python, adhering to the WSGI standard. In the long term, it is meant
to compete with systems like phpBB.

It provides an advanced plugin system with a component architecture which
allows other developers to modify Pocoo to their liking without the need to
touch existing source code. Building upon SQLAlchemy, Pocoo is able to
use either MySQL, SQLite, Oracle or Postgres as the storage backend.

The 0.1 release is not meant to be feature complete. It's more like a preview
to show off what's already there. If you like the idea, *feel free to join us!*


Features
^^^^^^^^

Currently implemented:

* Support for either flat or threaded post view
* URLs are very readable, furthermore one URL works for both flat and
threaded view
* Support for JSONRPC and XmlHTTPRequest to dynamically fetch data where
useful while having a fallback for non-JS users
* Very powerful plugin system
* Extensible authentication system
* WSGI compliancy
* Database support for MySQL, Sqlite, Postgres, Oracle
* BBCode/rst/safehtml parsers for markup
* Javascript editors for the markup
* Avatar support
* User profiles and settings

Planned features

.... can be found in the Idea Pool at http://trac.pocoo.org/wiki/IdeaPool.


Download
^^^^^^^^

Download the release at <http://www.pocoo.org/download>.


Cheers,
Georg Brandl, on behalf of the Pocoo Team

 

[Paul Rubin]

Pocoo <http://www.pocoo.org/> is a bulletin board software
(aka. message board) written in Python, adhering to the WSGI
standard. In the long term, it is meant to compete with systems like
phpBB.

You too, huh? I've also always wanted to write one of those. Mine
would be performance-intensive. I've never understood why the phpBB,
vBulletin, etc. systems that I use bog down so much. It's a very
serious problem--the bigger boards I hang out on all have to use
multiple servers, resulting in big hosting bills ($1000's per month),
so they have to take advertising, hold fundraisers all the time, etc.
But the raw hardware really needed if the software were any good,
including adequate bandwidth, should fit within the cheap
managed-hosting servers (typically a 1U rack-mounted single processor
Celeron box for $100 a month or so) or on a VPS for smaller loads
($50/month or less). That means the hosting fees can be paid out of
pocket by a few donors, getting rid of all kinds of fundraising
headaches and increasing organizational and content flexibility a lot.

So, I think it's not worth thinking about writing yet another BBS
unless it can handle a Slashdot-sized load on a commodity PC. For
very large loads it should be able to use multiprocessor hardware
effectively (an 8-core Athlon server costs as much today as an entry
level engineering workstation of the 1990's). I've even played with
the idea of using MPI for this ("imagine a Beowulf cluster of...")
which would let you couple multiple boxes together with ordinary LAN
hardware, letting you scale straightforwardly to hundreds of cpu's. I
think it should be possible to do all this, using a system still
written mostly in Python.

My suggestions:

1) ditch the SQL back end, or at least don't depend on it. Someone
had the clever idea of using an NNTP back end, using a news server (or
a network of them) as a message store. That gets you all kinds of
features for free. Otherwise, keep all messages in an mmap'd disk
file that can be shared in memory between multiple processes. Adding
messages would append to the file, and to some kind of log that would
reconstruct in-memory structures in the event of server restart.
You'd also need some IPC synchronization scheme.

2) Look at the architecture of WebCrossing and also of OKWS (www.okws.org).

3) Hmm I had some more, I'll keep thinking.

 

[Felipe Almeida Lessa]

So, I think it's not worth thinking about writing yet another BBS
unless it can handle a Slashdot-sized load on a commodity PC.

Python is slow. Psyco helps, but you should use C instead.

And yes, I am kidding =)

 

[riklaunim]

We're pleased to announce that

Pocoo 0.1 (beta) was released today (Sept. 10, 2006).

Pocoo <http://www.pocoo.org/> is a bulletin board software (aka. message board)
written in Python, adhering to the WSGI standard. In the long term, it is meant
to compete with systems like phpBB.

Python needs good forums I'm writing my own forum app also, called
"MyghtyBoard" - http://code.google.com/p/diamanda/ using Django
[check the screenshots].

python isn't PHP -> most python powered sites use a framework (from
zope to web.py) so it would nice if the script could be easily "plugged
in" to popular python frameworks (users, permissions, forum data)

 

[robin]

The 0.1 release is not meant to be feature complete. It's more like a preview
to show off what's already there. If you like the idea, *feel free to join us!*

Looks very nice so far. Will fill an important gap in Python apps.

Oh, and you've been blogged:
http://diagrammes-modernes.blogspot.com/