PGWest Slides, Back to Work

Well, back to work a bit, anyway. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S., so I’m not likely to do much more until next week. But I’ll be heads down on it, then, working to get the search site done.

Before I talk about that, though, I realize that I forgot to post the link to my slides from PGWest. I actually posted them before the talk, I just never got round to mentioning it here. So, here it is:

I’m pretty happy with how it came out. The organizers shot video of it, too; I’ll post a link or embed when it drops.

Meanwhile, I have returned to work on the search site design. How do you like it? The pages I’ve completed the design for are:

• Search/Home Page
• Search Results
• Extension documentation
• Distribution information
• Owner information

Imagine if all open-source PostgreSQL extensions were posted on this site. You could search through them all, including their documentation, browse their docs, find related extensions, and see what else the extension owner has worked on. All in one place, without downloading anything. That’s the plan for this site. Notice anything missing you think should be there? Let me know.

So I’m going to start work on the app to create this now, but before I do, I wanted to point out the PGXN project wish list wiki. Folks have been having all sorts of ideas for features that would be great for PGXN, and I don’t want to lose track of them. So if you’ve had any ideas at all, no matter how big or small, please feel free to add them to the wiki. As the project progresses, some I might be able to just build in, but others I might want to see go onto a project road map. What do you want to see on the road map?

Oh, and if you want to see your extensions on this site, please do register a PGXN Manager account. Once your account is approved (and we’re pretty quick to do so), have a look at the how to and release your extensions on PGXN today!

I’ve been working on my PostgreSQL Conference West presentation, which heavily features PGXN, of course. I think it’s looking good. If you’re at PGWest or are in the San Francisco area and free, come see the talk! Should be a good introduction to creating PostgreSQL extensions and distributing them on PGXN. The latest bit I added is a section on the modifications needed to support the forthcoming CREATE EXTENSION support slated for 9.1. Fortunately it’s dead simple, and will make dealing with extensions in the database a lot simpler, administratively. Really looking forward to that. Of course I’ll post slides once the talk is over.

As part of preparing for the talk, and because there isn’t currently much to actually see of PGXN, I’ve been mocking up the layout for the new search site, which as you know from the status page is the next part of the project I’m slated to work on. I’ve been committing the mockps to the gh-pages branch of the repository, which means you can see what it looks like live on the net right here. That’s the home page, including our sponsor links and tag cloud. Click the “PGXN Search” button to see a mockup of search results (or get them here). Click on any search result to see the mockup of a documentation page (or link it here). The design is based on the lazydays open-source Web design, and I’m quite happy with it. Your thoughts?

As this comes together, I’m gearing up to start hacking on the app to produce the search site. At this point, I’m thinking that it would become the new home page for PGXN, rather than a separate search.pgxn.org site. Thoughts?

I’ll post the slides tomorrow.