=head1 NAME

Catalyst::Manual::Monthly::2012::March::NotACatalystApp

=head2 Why the Monthly is not a Catalyst App

Back in the old days when web frameworks were new and shiny it made sense
for developers to show off how the framework makes development quick easy
and fun with little demonstration applications.  Create a blog in 5 minutes
is the classic example.  the L<Catalyst Advent Calendar|http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/repos/Catalyst/trunk/examples/CatalystAdvent> code was
another. And it served well for quite some time.

So when the time came to retire the calendar and replace it with this
monthly we needed some new infrastructure.  Well the obvious answer was to
replace it with some new infrastructure.  At first thought you'd think that
we might want to write a new Catalyst app.  But think again.

Basically all we really want to do is to provide a location on the web
where these articles appear.  Putting them into an RSS feed would also be
handy.  Finally publishing that RSS feed onto their own page would be
useful too.

While we could use Catalyst to do this, why should we?  Given we've got a
good packaging and distribution mechanism (the CPAN), and given we've got a
CPAN browser with a nice API (L<MetaCPAN|http://metacpan.org>), and given
we've got a nice documentation formatting mechanism (pod), that's already
all we need.  We don't need Catalyst for this, because it's not especially
big or complicated.  For big and complicated things like CPAN, a Catalyst
application is a useful thing, which is why we've got
L<MetaCPAN|http://metacpan.org>. To use an analogy, just because we've got
a hydraulic nail gun (Catalyst) doesn't mean we should go about shooting
everything we own with nails.

But although we don't need a Catalyst application we do need volunteers.

=head2 Making the Catalyst Monthly a Success

Here's what we need to make the Catalyst Monthly a success:

=over

=item *

Articles.  They can be longer (like last month's), or shorter (like this
month's).  It shouldn't take more than an hour to write a decent-ish
article based on work you've already done.  Remember there are always
editors available to look at your work and fix writing issues.

=item *

Infrastructure.  We need an RSS feed created  based on the MetaCPAN
API distribution, and/or from the Monthly's
<Lhttp://git.shadowcat.co.uk/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=catagits/Catalyst-Manual-Monthly.git|git
repository>.

=item *

Readers.  Commenters might be nice too.  But we can get them after we get
the infrastructure up, maybe by exploiting the L<Disqus|http://disqus.com/>
service.  We get more readers from having better infrastructure.

=back

Remember, Catalyst is glue to make web-like programing easy, efficient and
DRY (don't repeat yourself).  It's not a universal nail gun for all of your
programming problems.  It's the sign of a good web framework that it gets
out of your way until you need it, then it allows you to accomodate your
prior assumptions.

=head3 AUTHORS AND COPYRIGHT

Words and a little bit of code:
Kieren Diment <zarquon@cpan.org>

=head3 LICENCE

This documentation can be redistributed it and/or modified  under the same terms as Perl itself.
