Vanipedia Tech-team Mid to Long Term Projects

Middle Term Projects

1. Develop the Vanictionary

Skills - PHP,Python

Vanictionary will be dynamic dictionary which will help visitors explore and browse Sanskrit and Bengali terms used in Srila Prabhupada’s teachings. Natively MediaWiki does not support this feature. Either a new custom php module will have to be written to implement this, or if there are available platforms, we will need to evaluate such systems and see which one can be customised to meet our specific needs.

2. Evaluate new cloud service providers

Skills - System Adminstration

From the beginning, we have been using Rackspace as our cloud provider. Over time there have been several new providers, so it would be good to do a thorough evaluation in terms of service, bandwidth, support and cost to identify if there are better services we coul use for running Vanipedia.

3. Evaluate application architecture of Vanipedia

Skills - System Administration

Currently, our web and database servers reside on the same physical host. An environment health check should be performed to see where the possible bottlenecks may be in terms of Cpu utilisation, memory, bandwidth etc., and then if needed to redesign the architecture of Vanipedia for better performance, cost effectiveness and scalability.

4. Evaluate content delivery networks for site optimisation

Skills - System Administration

In order to deliver content to the end user at a faster rate, we want to evaluate the advantages of implementing CDNs’.

5. Harden the server

Skills - System Administration

Using recommended guidelines/standards for IT security, implement server hardening to improve security of the sites.

Long Term Projects

1. Develop Vaniversity

Skills - Research and Evaluation of Open source platforms

The educational petal of Vanipedia Evaluate open-source or home grown platforms and systems that will facilitate devotees to design and develop educational courses.