SoC geeklog2 syndication api

This is one of the projects to be implemented during the Google Summer of Code 2009.

Student: Barry Carlyon, Mentor: Justin Carlson

Incentive

It should be reasonably clear to any web savvy user or developer that Syndication is an essential aspect of any web software these days. The AptitudeCMS engine needs a powerful, flexible syndication engine that can be used by all other plugins to provide inbound and outbound syndication feeds.

Objective

• Develop a fully object oriented PHP5 implementation of the Geeklog 1.x syndication classes for reading/writing arbitrary feeds. Use of Zend_Feed or similar library strongly encouraged.
• Develop a AptitudeCMS Plugin which provides a full API wrapper to the Syndication classes for creation and maintenance of outbound and inbound feeds

Level of Difficulty

Easy

Geeklog 1.x's syndication framework is quite nice (even if I do say so myself!) and provides a good basic PHP4 OO implementation of the basic feed handling code. This needs turning into fully object oriented PHP5 (there are some refinements PHP5 allows that the current code misses. This is the easy part.

The harder part is defining what the interface from AptitudeCMS is and how it works, and working with the AptitudeCMS framework, which only a couple of engineers are really up to speed with. Figuring this out from scratch will be the challenge to get something "right first time" to avoid the need to radically over-haul and replace the syndication framework at a later stage.