It’s what everyone’s been waiting for – an update from the OpenFarm development team.

It’s been an incredibly busy month in stats. There have been about 50,000 bits of code added to the database (and 25,000 bits deleted, which is about as important really) since the start of August. The OpenFarm codebase has 18 contributors – which we’re absolutely thrilled with – not considering the amazing people doing so much work outside of the code (which is a lot harder to measure, but this is a dev update, so we’ll stick to that).

Numbers aside, here’s an overview of OpenFarm as a program:

OpenFarm runs on Ruby on Rails enhanced with a largely AngularJS front-end (this is still a matter of debate). We have a MongoDB database, which guarantees maximum flexibility in these early growth stages, and fast search and upgrading into the future. Search of our database is powered by ElectricSearch. Our code is stored on GitHub. If you’re interested in such things, OpenFarm has a testing framework that reports to Coveralls – we try to keep our back-end test coverage at 100%. We’re still looking for a good way to test front-end code.

Our API is in the works and you can get an overview of it on our wiki. We’re figuring out a way to make Rails Serializer build a json:api compliant API, though this hasn’t been quite as straightforward as we had hoped. In the meantime, if you want to play around with what’s there, definitely do – we love to see what other people build with the data we’re going to be providing.

If working with any of these tools interests you, we’re always happy to welcome new contributors. Have a look at our issues to see how you can help.

What’s next

In the spirit of a pull request, here’s what our short term plans are for development:

• We’re undergoing a major re-haul of how our stylesheets are organized. This refactoring is something that we’ll do regularly to keep the codebase sane, and we’re super grateful that Ryan took it upon himself to do this.
• We recently published a redesign for guide creation. Have a look at it on loomio. We’ve started iterating on this design, and the first part of it can already be seen on the server.
• Search results are undergoing a re-styling. This is largely done, but is waiting on the stylesheet re-jig to be pushed live. You can also see that discussion on loomio.

We hope to give you a report like this every couple of weeks. Any help, feedback, and thoughts will always be welcome!