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As you might have heard, my MetaCPAN project has been accepted for the Google Summer of Code. If you are unfamiliar with the proposal, you can find it here.

The first few weeks are called the "bonding period". In this period the student is supposed to bond with their mentors and the community, read docs and get to know the project.

My tasks for this period are mainly to contact maintainers and author of CPAN Ratings, CPAN Testers and CPAN Vote to figure out how to include their data in the index. With CPAN Testers this was quite easy. They provide a SQLite database that includes test results for each release on the CPAN. Unfortunately we were not yet able to contact Ask, who is maintaining the CPAN Ratings page. There is a CSV file that includes some data, but it's heavily aggregated and thus not very useful for MetaCPAN.

Also, the ElasticSearch schema has been set in stone. I don't expect any significant changes to the existing schema. I will, however, add new properties to it as new data becomes available (e.g. CPAN Testers etc.). You can find the current schema here. Some examples: the latest Moose release can be found at http://api.beta.metacpan.org/release/Moose. Information about the Moose module can be found at http://api.beta.metacpan.org/module/Moose (it corresponds to the file mapping in the schema).

Next on the list is to get to know OAuth and think of a way how users can authenticate against MetaCPAN to enable services like tagging and following of authors and distributions.

If you want to join the discussion about MetaCPAN, its API and the front-end, feel free to join us on #metacpan / irc.perl.org.