Cross posted from the CPAN Testers Blog
Quite a bit of activity has been happening in the last month, as you are no doubt aware if you are already reading this :) It marks a significant leap forward for CPAN Testers, which I hope continues.
First off David Golden managed to successfully input a report into the Metabase, following the full process of testing, reporting, and submitting the report. The Metabase is the centre piece to the whole move to CPAN Testers 2.0, so this is a major step forward. There is still plenty to do, before CT2.0 is fully implemented, but it a great step towards the end goal. Well done to David and Ricardo.
The biggest visual change that happen last month was the facelift given to several of the CPAN Testers websites. The new look had been on the cards to do for quite sometime, but it wasn't a high priority, as functionality changes took most of my time. However, with some enforced CFT, I finally got a round tuit (although sadly not one of those wooden ones I see every so often at conferences :( ). Prompted by a post by Adam Kennedy, I spent some time after doing the biggest functionality to look at ways to improve the look and feel. I found a design that looked suitable, and began to adapt it for the look and feel that was released. Despite some disappointed comments, the majority of feedback as been very favourable.
Part of the functionality changes include with the release of the new designs, was to now have a static site that reflects all the recent fixes to the underlying codebase, but without all the javascript extras available in the dynamic site. A number of people have been asking for a site that would enable them to switch from the old site, including some with issues with accessibility. As the old sites had not been updating since the end of March, the need for the static site grew. After a week bedding the new site in, the old URLs have now been moved to the new sites, so you will at least get redirected now. However, I would like to ask that if you have any reference to the old domains in code or documentation, or can update and wikis or online articles, please change to the new domains. If you don't have access or cannot update any changes, please let me know and I will try and contact the right author. The domains to change are:
On the 30th March 2009, at around 2.15AM, the 4 millionth post to the cpan-testers mailing list was made. While we still have a little way to go for the 4 millionth report, it still marks an impressive milestone in the history of CPAN Testers. With just another 80,000 or so reports to go, we should reach the 4 millionth report sometime this month.
On the CPAN Testers Discussion mailing list, I happened to point out that on every page of the new site design, across all the sites, the footer now includes a reference to the Perl programming language. David Golden has now done the same for the reports from CPAN-Reporter, but he lamented that if only we'd been doing this from the start. Thankfully I have a solution for that, as another site I'm planning on implementing is one to replace the NNTP web interface that is currently used. So that'll be 4 million web pages to add to the engines :)
We topped 144 testers submitting reports last month, so thank you again to everyone involved. The mappings this month included 36 total addresses mapped, of which 22 were for newly identified testers.
One method that might help the pages populate the search engine better would be an XML sitemap document?
Just pondering...
