Tuesday 14 August 2007

Well, it happened

Its shameful to admit, but this is my cherry blog. It happened almost by accident, but now its done. Ahh, the fredom to rant and rage to the world or not....

The geek in my is enjoying figuring out the ins and out of creating plugins for Confluence (second cherry of the day), not bad, not bad. It all looks reminiscent of Apache Struts and forwards to JSP , albeit with Velocity templates taking over from JSP, not surprising considering its a webapp.

Why do this? well, all I want to do is not spam a thousand people when I have to patch a server, playing nice I would like to issue targeted mail. How to do that? Given Confluence, its not straight forward but can be done, probably. I'm looking at modding the existing UserList plugin to spit out a CSV list of users, which can then be embedded in the Mail NG plugin. Giving me a nice form to hit the exact userbase, perfect. All I have to do is figure out how to deploy it.

Confluence plugins look pretty powerful, I have some ideas about graphing org charts, perhaps with Graphviz, but that doesn't look flashy enough. I just wondered about SVG and would you believe it, there's a plugin for SVG also, fab. Its just a shame Microsoft can't support open standards, SVG plugins for IE are very hard to come by, I eventually used the discontinued COREL plugin due to its support for interactive functionality. Just as well there's Firefox.