Well, after some extensive hacking this long weekend, I’m happy to announce the opening of the refurbished (and renamed) PowerShell Code repository at it’s new domain: PoshCode.org with a few new features and a slightly overhauled look.

I expect that soon we’ll be replacing the back end with something which has a few enhancements over this version (at least in terms of tracking the many versions of a particular code contribution), but even without that, we hope that the current feature set will be enough to push the repository into mainstream usage as the primary place to share PowerShell code.

The new PoshCode site is still based on the old pastebin GPL source code, but I’ve hacked it up so much you’ll hardly recognize it. Sadly, I haven’t kept it as generically clean as I could have, so although I’m making the source code available, you’ll have to clean up the “layout” files if you want to run your own repository.

New Features

The most obvious new feature is that the front page now prominently features the most recent contributions. This list is filtered to only show the last in a series of contributions (so if you make a new contribution based on a previous one, the front page won’t be swamped with iterations of a single script the way the old one was).

The best new feature is that you can now browse by author (currently, you simply get a list of their 25 most recent contributions, in the future we’ll add some paging functionality as the need arises).

Finally, I’ve changed the description field (which previously allowed any html) to use only a restricted subset of Textile. I’ll put up some documentation about this later, but for now: you can make paragraphs by leaving a blank line, and can use asterisks for bold and underscores for italics … and starting each line with an asterisk or a pound sign will get you bulleted or numbered lists. Any links will be rel=“nofollow” and you can’t use raw HTML at all.

Earlier Enhancements

In addition to these new features, there are a few other enhancements that I added on to the original code: a couple of extra fields, permanent storage, search functionality, and a recent contributions RSS feed.

Incidentally, the search functionality allows you to search the author, description, title, and main content fields using MySQL’s full-text indexing search, and is accessible via the new PoshCode script functions (available as both a PowerShell v2 CTP-compatible PoshCode module and a v1 PoshCode script).