Austrian Economics Wiki:Development

Mises.org is an open content and open source website – meaning that all the content as well as all the source code is available and free for anyone to use. The following material was primarily located at the old community wiki, but it was transferred here on July 12, 2011.

Overview of Mises.org Development Resources:

• Ohloh: development overview and source code analysis
• Web SVN Browse and download Mises.org source code
• MisesDev@Google Groups Mises.org Public Development Discussion Group
• Mises DB dump: latest copy of the Mises.org Database
• SVN access SVN access URL. Use guest/guest for anon access, request account from webmaster@mises.org to commit
• (Old) Ideas for Mises.org Ideas for New Mises.org

Downloading Mises.org Content

You can download an archive Mises.org via bit-torrent or get the latest copy by directory access to our site.

• All bit-torrent URL's

HTTP Directory Access:

• http://mises.org/multimedia/
• http://mises.org/pdf/
• http://mises.org/books/
• http://mises.org/etexts/

• [1] Odata/AtomPub Database Access

How to help: opportunities for volunteers

While anyone can contribute, here are the roles we really need:

• Creative: Creative art and web designers to create amazing new interfaces
• Tech Support: Technically competent tech-support kind of people
• Coders: .Net/C# programmers
• A/V media: Audio/visual media experts
• SysAdmins: System administrators for Windows and Linux
• Project Managers: “feature owners” and organizers of the development effort
• Testers: People to test new features and track down bugs

Mises.org TODO/Ideas List

A list of ideas to implement on Mises.org, ranked from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest) priority. Rank 1-2 is a nice to have. 3-4 are near to medium needs, 5 must be implemented ASAP.

While this may seem like a long list, it used to be much longer! Contact webmaster@mises.org or MisesDev for details.

• 5: Unified authors page to replace http://mises.org/authors/231/J246rg-Guido-H252lsmann
• 5: Redesign of mises.org/literature.aspx
• 5: Redesign of mises.org/daily/album/
• 1: Translate Mises.org into other languages.
• 1: Automatically transcribe and index all audio/video content on Mises.org
• 1: Setup an Austrian Economics progress metric to track growth of mises.org community and web traffic
• 1: Book/media rental subscription service (like Netflix)
  • At least for books that are freely downloadable, for those that would rather pay a little money to read a hard copy rather than read it on a computer screen, but don't want to, or can't afford to, buy the book
• 1: Organize the supporting arguments of Austrian economics as a directed graph or network (some nodes representing propositions that are either premises or conclusions of arguments) and the arcs connecting the nodes on the computer screen representing things like a logical supporting relationship. One could then browse through the logic of Austrian economics in a graph (network) format.
• 1: Have RSS/ATOM feeds for the Mises.org media content split up by year (or quarter) first released. My rationale is that for those of us who want the whole firehose of media content, having a time organized split will make it easier to manage as the past time feeds will never change.
• 2: Gradually move Mises.org, in part or in full, to an open-source .NET CMS platform. Lots of things could be done better code-wise, and lots of it has already been done in existing platforms. Looking at the back-end domain model, N2 CMS (http://www.n2cms.com/) might be very useful.
  • Pros: Deferring development of core CMS functionality to a third-party product leaves more dev time for other things. Functionality which does not exist yet, might be implemented in an existing CMS.
  • Cons: Adapting the codebase might take some time. (It could probably be done step-by-step though. Refactoring the Blog and Daily sections would probably be very fast. Literature and Media sections would take some more analysis and backend development.)
• 3: Put more media collections on ITunes U. Make media collections easier to find on the site.
• 1: Enhance admin UI for the Mises Quiz
• 1: Better media streaming
• 1: MetaParser needs to be refactored.
• 2: create mobile version of mises.org like m.mises.org
• 2: Setup automated backup for everything
• 3: move Mises.org to the cloud (In progress)

How to get Mises.org running locally

For developers: how to get started with your own copy of Mises.org:

1. Install ASP.Net 4.0 and Sql Server Express [
2. Checkout MisesWeb from https://code.mises.com:8443/svn/MisesWeb/trunk/MisesWeb (you can use guest/guest)
3. Restore http://mises.org/services/torrents/MisesClean.7z to a local SQL DB (check for the latest dump or SQL file here) tutorial here and update the connection strings in web.config
4. Open project MisesWeb.sln in Visual Studio 2010 and click “Build Solution”.
5. Go to http://localhost. Success! Mises.org running on your pc!
6. Commit your changes and see them on Mises.org!

Links

• How you can help Mises.org