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[barryvan]

Hiya.

Not sure if this is the right forum for this, but it seemed the most appropriate...

I've been doing a lot of work on the engine that I've written to run the barryvan compo, and I've decided to make it open source. The reason is that I want it to be usable by lots of people for running their competitions. Ideally, they should be able to set up a compo in about five minutes flat with it. I'm looking for people who'd be interesting in doing a bit of work on it.

Current features:

• Themes, thanks to the Smarty template engine! Yep, I just finished that up about thirty minutes ago. Each page is now Smartied up.
• Single-file site configuration - all pertinent information, like the compo name, URL, theme, and so on, are stored in an INI file.
• MySQL for storing news, inspirations, tracks, votes, and links (to other sites).
• News RSS feed. Also today.
• Automatic entry and vote management - the system automatically allows entering and voting to start at pre-determined times, based on the round's start time.
• Automatic results viewer - the system produces pretty tables of results for older rounds.

Wishlist:

• Full compo configuration, including management of round starts/ends and "mini-compos" (a la Novus). Basically, I'd like a more modular architecture, where you just load the "compo module" for your selected compo type. So I'd load the "Inspiration" module for the barryvan compo, whereas someone else might load the "Genre-based" module. Each module would, of course, have to be configurable...
• Web-based administration tools, like in a CMS. At the moment, I use PHPMyAdmin and FileZilla.
• A better handling of the "main" page, which contains the other pages, for themers. At the moment, there's too much PHP in it; ideally, it should only be Smarty, but that's hard unless you use a deprecated function.
• General code clean-up and tidying.

So, anyone interested? I'm in the process of setting up a SourceForge project for it, but they say that can take up to three working days. Also, anyone have any more ideas? Throw 'em at me!

[Saga Musix]

that sounds like a pretty nice project. Probably you should add support for different compo types, f.e. One Hour Compos (so the most popular compo types could be set up easily)

[barryvan]

Yeah, that'd be one of the compo "modules" that are in the wishlist. Ideally, you'd be able to download additional compo types and just install them with a click. And, of course, you'd be able to write your own. Maybe XML... Hmm...

[m0d]

Cool idea. You know, it's funny how many compo manager systems there have been made and how many have been open sauced [sorry, I read theregister.co.uk ]. I think yours is the first.

Believe me, I'd love to get involved to some degree but as you may already know I have a very full plate and hardly any spare love to give