MySQL launched another community website called MySQL forge.
Along the lines of sites like Sourceforge or Developer Forge (Joomla) the site hosts and encourages the development open source projects which are directly related to MySQL.
One of the nicer (web 2.0) features which makes the navigation (and finding software) very intuitive, are tags you can enter to categorize your project. And (currently) everybody – registered or not – is allowed to add tags and help.
The registration process looks pretty easy, nothing fancy – if you are already registered with MySQL, your account will work on the forge as well. Thumbs up for the single-sign-on.
Aside from tags, there is nothing too fancy to tell. A feature worth noting are saved searches, which you can access from your “control center” (requires a login). A good feature to keep track of changes.
Too bad MySQL seems to have totally forgotten about RSS. There are no feeds available on the website – not the popular items, no news, nada. This could be due to the phase (one of three) the “forge” project itself seems to be in but makes it look a bit weak.
The look is very straight forward and clean (good thing) and you will probably notice a few things that need to be worked on and ironed out, but even though, you will already find a few goodies browsing around the categories.
The content of the site devides itself into projects and snippets – projects obviously means software and snippets are snippet code – e.g. a handy script to backup your MySQL server or a small script to “fake” sequences on MySQL (since they are not supported, yet).
The website also has a wiki, which is a bit poorly integrated when you compare it to the rest of the MySQL universe. One would expect a better rollout from them. But the Wiki is (of course) not mission critical, what matters to me is the rest of the website.
The bottom line is: Even though it’s not completely done, if you are running MySQL, this site has to be in your bookmarks!
Tags: mysql, Open Source, software, forge