One possible line of attack is to start with a copy of the engine being used at Everything2. JayBonci has done a lot of incredible work over there and their engine is in many ways far better and more modern than ours. (What I don't know is whether it is actually as modern as we would want our new system to be.)

In fact, it seems he had at one time started work on exactly this: a new PerlMonks testbed instance based on E2 code.

• Everything2 github repository and being of value to perlmonks ⇒ Github repo up, bootstrap partially working ⇒ Github repo up, bootstrap working 98%
• E2's todo list, of interest to PM
• E2 site code about to take an incompatible change