CruiseControl.NET and Ohloh

Introducing Ohloh

Ohloh is a social site for open-source development – it allows developers to track what is happening with their projects, to “toot their horns” so to speak. Their website is at http://www.ohloh.net/ – and you can even see CruiseControl.NET on there (https://www.ohloh.net/p/cruisecontrol).

Some More Stats

Since we are both open source projects, I thought I’d add a quick link between the two. This link means you can now see Ohloh stats for your open source project within CruiseControl.NET itself.

Actually, I didn’t think of this idea myself – instead I got it from the Subtext instance of CruiseControl.NET (http://build.subtextproject.com/ccnet/ViewFarmReport.aspx). This is another open source project – one that uses both Ohloh and CruiseControl.NET. Actually they’ve done a very nice job of customising CruiseControl.NET – take a look sometime.

Rather than using their approach, I’ve taken a more limited approach (their Ohloh stats are displayed on the main pages – which is ok for them since they have CruiseControl.NET for only one project). Instead I’ve added a plug-in that enables a project to be linked to Ohloh.

Here are some pictures of what I’ve implemented:

This first picture shows the Ohloh quick summary next to the project title. Also, there is now a “View Ohloh" Stats” menu command (on the left). Clicking on this link brings up the Ohloh widgets in their own page:

Configuring this requires two steps:

Configure the server

since the stats are on a per-project basis the actual link is stored in ccnet.config. To configure a project to link through to Ohloh, add the following configuration:

<linkedSites>

  <namedValue name="ohloh" value="322"/>

</linkedSites>

In this case the project id for CruiseControl.NET in Ohloh is 322. This would be replaced with the identifier of the project.

Add the Ohloh Stats Package

The first step configured the server, this step configures the plug-in in the dashboard. The quick summary will be enabled when the Ohloh link is added, to add the “View Obloh Stats” command this plug-in must be installed.

In Conclusion

This was a nice simple feature to implement (for a change!) If you have an open source project, give it a spin and let me know what you think (sorry – this is only for open source).