As a shot in the dark, i'm pretty sure my PageCamel framework (Perl, integrated webserver and workers, service manager, etc) would be a viable base for PM2.0. It uses PostgreSQL as a database. PageCamel is Open Source, but is also used as a base in commercial projects (internal as well as a point-of-sales system my company currently sells).

I know PageCamel is unlikely to be chosen, because it's not a "hype", "modern perl" project. But i like to take this opportunity to "advertise" my open source projects as a possibility.

It's designed to be highly extensible, integrates all kinds of features that lower manual maintenance (automated DB backups, automated PG statistics triggering). PageCamel is designed to run independant workers (that's how chatterbot and cp stats work), the user management is highly adaptable (adapting the current usergroups/permissions from PerlMonks would be a matter of a couple of hours at the most), and getting node rendering working shouldn't be too hard either.

I already use a system similar to Nodelets where different modules can "inject" data into a to-be-rendered page. PageCamel also supports multi-language, a per-user configurable font, theme support, a very configurable master data (de: "Stammdaten") editor, a WYSIWYG html editor and a lot more.

I currently don't have a discussion/threads/forum module though, but i have a lot of the required code basis to build one quickly. My rough estimate is that i could get one going with about 40 hours of work, about the same time it took me to take over the stuff from Tanktalus and implement Chatterbot.

And i certainly would be willing to put up the bulk of the work required. For free, of course. While commercial work pays my mortgage and puts food on the table, working with you folks is way more fun.

My main concerns would be to make the following things work from day one:

• Import all existing posts and User accounts from PM and make them render as correctly as possible.
• Node-IDs will continue to work as they are now and with the IDs unchanged for existing posts.
• Make sure existing external links to PM (including to specific posts) continue to work as normal.
• Integrate chat, chatterbot and stats directly into the system. This includes using the websocket and Net::Clacks support already built into my framework. This will make proper live-chatting possible and relatively easy to implement. (And yes, i would also implement proper APIs, which again, PageCamel would support rather easily).
• Improve search performance drastically by using PostgreSQL.
• Utilize existing PageCamel features like continously scrolling lists instead of paginated views for a more modern feeling and a better mobile experience.
• Provide the source code, installation instructions and a minimal test database to all pmdevs so everyone can run their own local dev system.

If there is interest, we could schedule some kind of online meeting (Discord?) where i could show how the framework works and what it can do.

The one thing that would be very helpful for a more detailed project proposal/estimate would be a database dump of the PM database (with the passwords and other sensitive information nuked, of course). That way i could start to design the PG schema and write a proof-of-concept importer for the user accounts and posts.

Conclusion: I don't forsee any insurmountable problems in porting PM from EE to the PageCamel framework. Getting "feature complete" on par with existing PerlMonks with all the bells&whistles and finetuning might take quite a bit of work (polls, XP, APIs, etc).

But getting a backwards compatible "basic" version running with all the pre-existing posts shouldn't be too hard. Replacing existing systems is sort of what the PageCamel system is designed for, after all.