Some new MetaCPAN features

By Gábor Szabó - גאבור סבו on September 12, 2014 10:14 AM

Perlybook integration: Each pod page and each release page now have two additional links to download MOBI and EPUB version of the current pod or the combined pod of the whole distribution.

The CPAN Author dashboard (can be reached from the 'Lab') now lists all of the distributions of the currently logged in CPAN author providing some overview of all the distributions.

The right panel can be now hidden (and then shown again) giving more real-estate for the documentation. Especially useful for smaller screens. This is persistent in the browser, but currently only works on the POD pages. This feature is also, still under discussion. Your feedback would be valuable!

You can now change the number of items shown on each result page. See the buttons
at the bottom of the search result pages. This choice is persistent in the browser.

Special Meta searches This is not new, but I only found out about these recently after writing how to
Find all Plack Middleware or Perl::Critic Policies.

Oh and something totally unrelated. I started to write an explanation about CPAN for users, contributors, and module authors.

7 comments

7 Comments

Enkidu | September 12, 2014 1:11 PM | Reply

There are a number of modules that I didn't author, but I've picked up co-maint on them when the original author moved on. Any chance that I'll be able to see those on the Dashboard?
I don't at the moment, but maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

Gábor Szabó - גאבור סבו | September 12, 2014 1:19 PM | Reply

AFAIK the page should include all the distributions where you made the most recent authorized(!) release. Regardless if you were the original author or not. If that's not the case for you, please let me know the names of a few distribution you are missing.

The pages should probably also show non-authorized releases too. I'll add it to my TODO list.

Enkidu | September 12, 2014 6:13 PM | Reply

Sorry, I'm missing one module, but not the co-maint one I thought. I'm the owner, but not the original one. I'll send details off-line.

I took a look at the Perlybook integration for Algorithm::Kmeans on my Nook. At my age, I like to read at the middle size font, which leaves 50 chars on Helvetica and 35 chars fixed-width. The regular text is very easy on the eye, but the code is rendered for a wider screen and the line wrapping is ugly.

my $clusterer = Algorithm::KMeans->new( datafile        => $datafile,

                                        mask            => $mask,

                                        K               => 3,

                                        cluster_seeding => 'random',

                                        terminal_output => 1,

                                        write_clusters_to_files => 1,

                                      );

You can see that this would be proper formatting on a regular screen.

It's got great potential. I see a day when some bright young spark, grabs the whole of CPAN, runs perltidy over it to re-format the code and connects all the links so it jumps from POD to module tutorial and the whole thing fits in my pocket.

lajandy | September 13, 2014 1:41 AM | Reply

EPUB you say? Gotta try that out...

Toby Inkster | September 13, 2014 10:45 AM | Reply

I really like the new version of the dashboard. Some suggestions:

The bug counts could be a link to the issue tracker.
Rather than using an "X" is those three centre columns, maybe use "R", "L", and "A". This is because once you've scrolled down the table a little, and the header is out of view, it's difficult to remember what each "X" represents.
It would be nice to be able to distinguish between open/new bugs, and stalled ones, because when skimming through the dashboard, looking for dists needing my attention, I can tell which ones have bugs that are not immediately fixable.
It would be nice to be able to sort the table by different columns - this could be implemented in Javascript.

Gábor Szabó - גאבור סבו replied to comment from Enkidu | September 13, 2014 12:41 PM | Reply

@Enkidu, I think the best would be to talk to the PerlyBook developers. MetaCPAN only includes a link to the download page.

Gábor Szabó - גאבור סבו | September 15, 2014 9:41 AM | Reply

@Toby Inkster I added those to my TODO list. Thanks for the ideas.

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About Gábor Szabó - גאבור סבו

I blog about Perl.

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Gábor Szabó - גאבור סבו