The Background Stuff

So you've stumbled upon DOINS and want to know more? Well, here's the place where you can do just that.

DOINS is an interactive web site wherein anyone with common interests may share news. News stories are submitted to the webmaster, who then posts them onto the main page. Then other people can make comments on them.
Right now, DOINS is basically a feature-incomplete replica of slashdot.org, hence the acronym DOINS: DOINS Is Not Slashdot.
DOINS doesn't have all of the features that Slashdot has, but as time permits we will be working on implementing them.

DOINS is a heavily database-driven web application, powered by the Linux operating system, Apache webserver, mySQL database, PHP hypertext preprocessor, and a bit of Perl.

The Demo

Since DOINS is a web project, it only makes sense that you should be able to see what it is and what it does. By viewing the demo you will be able to get a preview of what DOINS does and what it's good for. The demo site's code is taken directly from anonymous CVS almost everytime there is an update, so it should always be semi-current.

The Code

Since DOINS originated on several very fine pieces of Free Software, it is only appropriate to give something back to the community from which it sprang. Therefore, DOINS is also a Free Software product. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL.

If you're interested in helping develop DOINS further, email me and we'll talk. If you would just like to browse our code, it is available through anonymous CVS. To access the code through CVS use the following commands on any standard Un*x box to retrieve the most recent version:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.doins.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/doins login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.doins.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/doins co doins

In addition, there is a web interface to CVS where you can browse through the code online.

Mailing Lists

We currently have three mailing lists set up:

• doins-users
• doins-devel
• doins-announce

Follow the links for information about subscribing to the lists, sending messages to the lists, or browsing the list archives.

Project Page

Visit the DOINS project page to get a little more info about this project.

Developers

DOINS is under active development. For proof of this please refer to our web CVS repository. The main developers on this project are myself, Ray, and Del.

Plans for the Future

Well, I (rbrown) released version 0.1.1 of DOINS on March 26, 2000.
Once I make sure that the comment viewing options work properly, I will release version 0.2.
You should check out the demo for more details about what doins can do.

The list of other things that have to be done to bring DOINS up to the current level of Slashdot (in no particular order):

• Searching. (sort of works already, but is not complete)
• Make sure the different types of viewing methods work correctly.
• Moderation of comments and view-only modes.
• User account customization.
• Related story links.
• DoinsBoxes. :)
• backend/rdf format
• simple password encryption
• probably more...

Sites that use doins

So far, these sites use doins as their backend:

• DOINS itself
• Del's medieval site

Configurations

We've received reports that doins works with these computer configurations:

• Linux 2.x and greater with PHP3
• FreeBSD 3.2 and greater with PHP3
• BSDI BSD/OS 4.0.1, PHP4.0b2, Zend 0.90, Apache 1.3.1

This page last updated September 7, 2000.