Hi,
i am planning to replace the current Planet Wikimedia software early next week.
For those who might not even know planet: What is planet? --> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planet_Wikimedia
This is the current English planet as an example: --> http://en.planet.wikimedia.org/
The original planet software we have used up until now is unfortunately unmaintained and not available as a distribution package nor was it puppetized.
First there was the original planet software (planetplanet.org), then development stopped and then later it was continued as Planet 2.0. Though there is also "Planet Venus", " "a radical refactoring of Planet 2.0", and that is available as an Ubuntu package in universe :)
--> http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/ , http://packages.ubuntu.com/da/precise/planet-venus
--- quote from http://lwn.net/Articles/421348/:
".. However, Planet's development seems to have slowed considerably — if not entirely stopped. The last updates in Jeff Waugh's repository are dated early 2007.
Development seems to have carried on, somewhat quietly, with Planet Venus. It's not reflected on the Planet site at all, but digging through the mailing lists one finds development has continued under the name Venus or Planet Venus. Venus is "a radical refactoring of Planet 2.0," and development discussions continue on the old Planet mailing lists."... ---
Planet Venus uses html5lib, XSLT and Django templates to parse the feeds and create HTML. You can read more about it here: http://planet.wmflabs.org/html/
And here is a nice .svg showing the architecture is uses to parse feeds: http://planet.wmflabs.org/html/venus.svg
I had this running in labs for a while at http://planet.wmflabs.org/ and puppetized it.
You can find the puppet code in ./manifests/role/planet.pp and ./manifests/misc/planet.pp in the operations/puppet git repository. And recent changes can be found under topic branch "planet".
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=operations/puppet.git;a=blob;f=manif...
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=operations/puppet.git;a=blob;f=manif...
Additionally, with the help of James Alexander (thanks!), we recently went through a major cleanup of feed URLs, fixing lots of redirected/moved feed URLs and removed broken feeds.
This can be found here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planet_Wikimedia#Requests_for_Update_or_Remov... which also links to gerrit.
The new planet is already up here on a production host now:
http://zirconium.wikimedia.org/planet/
The English planet looks like this: http://zirconium.wikimedia.org/planet/en/
That index.html page will disappear, it is just there to link to the different language planets for testing. So to get it live i will just switch DNS to point to the zirconium host and make the index redirect to the page on meta, as it does now.
The feeds are currently all updated at 00:00 UTC via cron.
If you see any issues with that, please speak up soon.
And have a nice weekend,
Daniel