Merlin: The Genesis of an Idea
This is part one of a series on Merlin.
A couple of months ago, Scott announced a new internal contest. The goal was to build a Control Panel add-on for Community Server. For a couple of days I wrestled with a handful of ideas (an email/template/message editor, avatar/signature/video approval screens, badges, a multi-role assignment page, and even editors for siteurls.config/communityserver.config). While I liked the potential of all the ideas (some more than others), none of them seemed uber-cool. And to be honest, since it was going to be on my own time, that was criteria #1...the coolness factor.
After a couple more nights of thought, I finally came up with an idea that seemed both practical and cool, at least to me. You see, one thing I love about Community Server is its extensibility. Unfortunately, much of it is targeted at the developer. What I was looking for was a way for an administrator to customize his/her site using a simple point-click interface. Surely an add-on that allowed for significant customization with a no-code approach would draw more non-developers to the product (and get me a chance at a fun prize).
Next came the hard part. Figuring out exactly what I was about to do... (continued)