Trackbacks on pearweb

Hi all! Since some of you already noticed the new trackback item on the PEARWeb package pages, I'd like to publically annonce the functionality behind it. For those of you, who do not know trackbacks, here a short intro: In a nutshell, TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, "This is something you may be interested in." To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B. (Taken from [1].) Usually trackbacks are used in weblog entries, to indicate a relationship between 2 entries in (mostly) different blogs. Since blogging is a more and more growing way of writing about development related issues (see: [2]), a fair amount of documentation for open source projects is done through weblogs. Therefore, one can now trackback PEAR packages. For example: If someone blogs on HTML_Template_IT and includes the link to the package homepage ([3]) in his blog entry, the package will receive a trackback (presumed, the weblog system automatically generates trackbacks). The trackback information (title of the blog, the blog entry and a link to it) will not immediatelly be available on pearweb to avoid spamming, but the lead maintainers of the backtracked package and pear-webmaster will receive an email to approve the trackback. To avoid maintainers feeling bothered by this, every PEAR-Dev can approve/delet trackbacks for every package, so, if you don't wanna care of trackbacks, just ignore them. If a trackback once is approved, it's information is available publically on the specific PEARWeb site of the package (as long as a trackback is not approved, it's info is only available to logged-in users). If you're logged-in, you can also approve/delete trackbacks there. I hope you all like this new feature of PEARWeb and I belive this will bring us a fair ammount of further documentation in the future. If the system works well for packages, it will also be possible to extend it to other PEARWeb sites (like user info, PEPr proposals,...). If you have any questions, ideas, critics,... on that, please respond to this mail. With kind regards, Toby [1] http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/ [2] http://www.planet-php.net [3] http://pear.php.net/package/HTML_Template_IT -- Tobias Schlitt GPG Key: 0xA6529579 a passion for php http://www.schlitt.info Like to say "thank you"? - http://pear.php.net/wishlist.php/toby