[cgiapp] what i'd like to be doing: wish list software

[Ricardo SIGNES]

Ages ago, I wrote a horrible wishlist tracker for my family.  When my
grandmother was still the matriarch of the family, she was in charge of making
sure that everyone produced a wishlist.  These were then circulated through
the mail, and everyone checked things off.

This was subsequently replaced by email, which was a complete CF.  People would
mark something puchased by, say, making it italic.  Then someone would forward
the wishlist on after converting it to plain text.  People would send on two
copies simultaneously, and so on.  Basically, it got corrupted and suffered
from locking issues.

So, I wrote a totally horrible web application.  How horrible?  These are all
of its use/require statements:

  use strict;
  use DBI;
  use CGI qw/:all/;

I was... younger.

Anyway, we've been using it for years, and it works just fine, but it sucks and
is a pain to manage, and I'd like to let more people use it -- because that
means more people will give me gifts, right?*

I've started working on the replacement, but just barely.  It's still called
the same thing, Xenial, because the name is awesome.  What I really want is:

  1. non-HTTP logins, duh; see my previous post about OpenID
  2. variable privacy; either only people in groups you joined can see/touch
     your list, or everyone on the system can, etc.
  3. wishlists that are shared; either you can let other people manager your
     user's wishlists (useful for children), or you can create a shared
     wishlist "resource" representing, say, your department at work
  4. dependency; don't buy me vol. 4 if nobody got me vol 3.

Those are sort of my big architectural needs.  There are lots of more
incidental ones, more related to being a wishlist manager:

  1. links to the product online
  2. provide isbn to get links to various sellers, isbn.nu, etc
  3. quantity support (including 'unlimited quantity')
  4. comments, both visible and not visible to the wish list poster
  5. some kind of extensible metadata for things like "for system: wii" and
     "used okay: yes"

* http://rjbs.manxome.org/wishlist

-- 
rjbs