So, there’s a few new features in the latest version of the PoshCode script module, and a few new features in the repository itself, including an embed feature, which I will demonstrate by embedding one here. Notice that the scripts on the site have an embed code, and it will normally embed the full height of the script, but you can add a height parameter as I did here to force the height and cause vertical scrolling.

Resolve URL

New Cmdlet features

The latest version of both the v1 compatible PoshCode script (you have to dot-source it) and the v2 CTP2 compatible module support an -Upgrade parameter to the Get-PoshCode script, so you can call Get-PoshCode -Upgrade and it will retrieve the latest version of the script (whether you need it or not).

The New-PoshCode script has been fixed so you can use it to submit to other pastebin sites (particularly, the temporary one we use for support on IRC).

New Site features

The searches now return items with the same “probability” of being correct in date order, so newer versions of scripts show up at the top — this also affects the cmdlets, and the integration with apps such as PowerGUI. Note, however, that if an older version of the script fits your search-terms better, it may still show up at the top — I’m working on this.

The PoshCode site now supports wrapping by other community sites — if you want to wrap our site in yours, let me know, and I can give you a custom subdomain and allow you some control over the display, as I did for PowerShell Community …

I finally fixed the problem with logging that my host was having, so I have a week’s worth or so of logs which Webalyzer informs me show that we average about 600 visits a day, and a surprising number of subscribers to our RSS feed…

Upcoming features

I have three new features planned for the next couple of weeks or so: finishing the browsing feature, implementing better version-tracking, and adding tagging. The key feature missing from the brownsing is the ability to go to the “next page” of results (right now you can only see the first page of scripts for the site or for authors) — we should have that fixed soon.

The version tracking feature (which is mostly a matter of cleaning up some db queries) will result in being able to build a visual history for a given submission, including branching, etc. and should allow users to easily retrieve “the latest” version of a given script.

Tagging will improve searching and browsing by providing a way to categorize scripts and browse by tags, but I’m a little nervous about it because it seems that to be useful it will need to allow tags to be added by users who didn’t create the original script, and this is complicated since we have not so far created a login/authentication system.

I’m still debating how to properly do this, but I think that ultimately we’re going to have to use a login system with support for OpenID so that authors can identify themselves with their blog URLs, etc … and can use the same identity on the PowerShell Community site once that site gets their OpenID implementation working properly.

The alternative that I had been considering: using signed scripts as the only authentication, seems to fail in the instance of tagging — it would basically require you to make up a PSD1 file specifying the script id and the tags you want to apply and then sign it and submit it. I think you’ll agree that’s way too much work for the end users, even if it was automated — and it would also require the server to validate the signature and parse the script!

I’ve been having problems with the search functionality on the PoshCOde repository, and I just thought I’d throw this up here because I just now solved the biggest problem: ranking. Up until now, the results have not been returned in order of relevance — this is because the search works using MySQL’s FULLTEXT BOOLEAN search, which doesn’t return in relevance order, nor does it return an extra ‘score’ column.

I’ve fixed that, and weighted the search so that words in the title count more than words in the code by creating a relevance column by hand:

Incidentally, the FULLTEXT index means that words shorter than 4 characters don’t count (I’m going to try to get this changed, but it’s an option for MySQL, so it has to be changed in the config file) in the meantime you can search for words using the wildcard character, like: SQL* and it sort-of works. The PoshCode cmdlet actually was adding *‘s to the query (although I’ve just decided that’s not a good idea, because it means that queries from the cmdlet appear to have different results than queries on the website.

MySQL’s FULLTEXT BOOLEAN search has all sorts of features (and limitations): there is a stopword list, maximum and minimum word lengths, and all sorts of operators for setting word precedence or negating words, or weighting them negatively … to REQUIRE that a word be present, it must have a + in front, and in order to mark a word as more important, you have to put > in front, not just put it first… I’ve been thinking about trying to apply a few of those tricks myself (eg: put * on words under four characters, and put > on the first 30% of words and < on the last 30% to try to simulate weighting them …) but my original feeling was that the search is more powerful if you just know that it’s a fulltext boolean search and can write your queries accordingly.

If anyone has any ideas for how to improve search in MySQL … or opinions on whether I should try to apply boolean operators to queries which don’t already have them … please let me know.

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).