This is a tremendous opportunity to do your first big project, and use something like Catalyst or Dancer to learn how a full-sized project should go. I think, honestly, that this is better done outside of Perlmonks, simply because grafting in a new section is, I believe, non-trivial -- and you'd learn about a framework that really only applies to this site and a few others.

Start simple and work your way up. This could be really cool, and you'd learn a lot (and frankly, make yourself marketable as a current-technology Perl programmer too!). Take a read through the overview stuff at the Dancer and Catalyst sites, and see what you think.

Assembling a design document (what you'd want to have on the site, how it would work, etc.) in your scratchpad is a good start. You can't build something until you have an idea of what it is you want to build. Yes, this is a big undertaking for just starting out, but a lot of stuff started out as "I really want this" followed by a lot of work to make it happen. (Case in point: I finally did get my wish to be able to have the debugger draw pictures of data structures for me -- after learning far more than I ever really wanted to know about the quirks in graphviz, and really learning how the debugger works so I could patch into it. That whole process took about two years of spare-time work.)

I think you can do it; you just need to get over the perception that someone else needs to lead. You can do that too! But you'll need to lead by example (i.e., by showing that you're putting work into trying to do something). It's perhaps not been well-put, or explicitly spelled out, but folks have essentially been saying "I'm not seeing that you are passionate enough about having this thing to try to do it yourself first." For most open-source programmers, actual code == actual interest; no code == no real investment in the idea.

So even a bad job, but one that shows you've put effort into it, is more likely to get help than the best-worded "I need help to do this" request.

In reply to Re^3: A Perl Project Page by pemungkah
in thread A Perl Project Page by perl.j

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.