Zurihac 2017

How to build the project

You will need Stack and npm.

$ stack build         # build the project
$ ./official.sh       # download the database from https://guide.aelve.com
$ stack exec guide    # start Guide

After that, the site will be running at http://localhost:8080/.

What to hack on

There's a bunch of issues at https://github.com/aelve/guide/issues, but I recommend taking one of issues listed below.

Non-coding issues

You can write content. Take any of the “To be written” categories at https://guide.aelve.com/haskell and list libraries, write about already listed libraries, or give examples. You can look at https://guide.aelve.com/haskell/lenses-sth6l9jl for an example of a more-or-less finished category.
You can improve the design. This is mostly about CSS and HTML, though, but it would still be appreciated. The HTML is mostly generated with Lucid, though there are some bits written as Mustache templates in the templates/ folder. The styles can be found in templates/css.widget.

Easy issues

Add a special page listing all broken links (i.e. links returning 400 or 500).
Improve analytics. Currently we've got lots of useless referrers (like encrypted.google.com – see this analytics screenshot). It'd be nice if duplicated links were lumped together, Google/Yandex links were parsed nicely, etc.

Medium issues

We've got search – for instance, here's how searching for “lens” looks. However, at the moment the search is somewhat dumb (if you look at Guide.Search you'll see that it simply does full-text search in titles and doesn't do fuzzy matching).
- One way to improve it would be to add fuzzy matching of some kind, e.g. take English morphology into account so that “lenses” would find lens-the-library.
- Another thing you can do is implement highlighting for found terms. See how GHC User's Guide does highlighting in this search for “kinds”.
Currently, if you edit something and somebody else also edits (and saves it) in the process, Guide will show you a popup saying “merge conflict, please resolve it”. Unfortunately, it doesn't show the diff between the conflicting versions; it'd be nice to highlight differences in them. This is a pretty easy task.
Guide also tries to resolve the merge confict by itself, but the algorithm it uses is pretty dumb (see https://github.com/aelve/guide/issues/91 for details). If you want to research merge algorithms and implement a better one, it'll be cool.
Since the database is publicly accessible, it should be possible to write an Electron wrapper that would download it and serve it offline. That's a pretty good issue in terms of power-to-weight ratio (i.e. it's useful and easy to do).
If you look at e.g. notes for lens, you'll find that editing them is a pain because you can only edit the whole thing at the time. It'd be better to allow editing subsections directly (and also code snippets). This is somewhat complicated because if someone else edits the section that you were also editing, the backend would have to somehow recognize which subsection you were editing. This can be done, for instance, by sending two pieces of text to the backend – (original text, modified text) – and then the backend would find the subsection that matches the original text and (try to) apply the changes to it.

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