Steem Institute: Curator Center: open source application and network to take your curation initiative to the next level

Curation Center is a new hub meant to provide products and services for the Steem curation industry, streamlining its operations and formalizing it.
We hope to build the curation industry from its current state into one where businesses could be built around the curation service. At the same time, we hope to provide app owners and communities with tools to streamline their curation initiatives.
Curator 4 is near completion and we would soon launch it next.

History

Vision

The core vision of Curator is to allow for organized content curation. Not the voting type of curation; but a full business service-oriented approach towards curation.

Products

Our products include the free open source Curator app as well as a coming curation network. We are developing these products as free and open source products for the Steem curation industry to use.

Development

Curator was initially developed within Peer Query, yet stripped to a standalone app for the Steem community's use.

Curation Center

The Institute's Curator Center has now taken over the Curator project and will be responsible for its further development, maintenance, and promotion.
The new Github repo for the Curator app is now: https://github.com/curation-center/app.

Roadmap for App and Network

Set up autotests for the app

We currently do not yet have autotests(such as Mocha tests) for the app. This will come in the subsequent updates.

To Sequelize or not to Sequelize the app?

Sequelize.js would be nice for the app as it would let users have the freedom to choose which SQL DB to use. However, due to the complicated nature of Curator's DB, this would require another major refactoring while not probably paying off considering the limitations of ORMs.
Currently, Curator is built for MYSQL and uses 10 tables with an equal number of views and 79 Stored procedures(ranging from very complex to simple).
However, the entire DB setup is automated through an inbuilt `setup` utility so users never get to touch the DB during installation or use. If the need arises and the sophistication can be handled by Sequelize, we would adopt it.

Develop CSS skins for the app

We had intended to build a fully themeable interface for Curator, allowing users to install custom themes and be able to fully rebrand Curator for their use.
Unfortunately, the progress on the themeable framework(to be used on Adom and other clients) has been slow and is not ready yet. For this reason, we intend to use CSS themes for Curator.
Curator
is built on the Semantic UI framework, hence we are looking at themes from Semantic UI forest.

Introduce API for the app

The Curator API is another milestone we hope to reach soon. This API would allow third-parties apps to access the data(in an authorized scope) and interact with Curators.
The API would also be instrumental in establishing the Curation Network. Basically, most of Curator's frontend is powered by APIs, we just need to add a little touch to make it accessible to the public.

Introduce the Curation network

The Curation network is the biggest part of the Curation Center. It is basically a unified interface to access the data all partnering curation services through their API.
Each Curator app would be tuned as a node that pigs the network frequently of its uptime status. That way the network could have a list of all active connecting Curation services.
Using this list, we would then build an interface where you could access the data of these connecting curation services through their API.
You could search a user account, see all curation services that have curated their work, see advanced metrics of their activity on each connecting client, see their total earns across clients, their reputation, blacklistings and more.
You can also search for a post, and see which curation services curated it, the curators and more.

Introduce docs

Unfortunately, currently, there are no docs for Curator, except for the posts written on them as well as the scanty guide in the Github repo's README.
Documentation is on the list of our priorities, beginning with a basic user guide for the app.

The project's overview

Acknowledgments

During the initial development by @PeerQuery, we received the support of @Utopian-io and the Steem community. Thanks to everyone for their support all along.

Please use with attribution

Curator is free to use and open source under MIT license. However, we would ask users of the app to kindly include an attribution link at the footer. A simple "Powered by Curator", with a hyperlink to https://curation.center.

Project links

App repo: https://github.com/curation-center/app
Project repo: https://github.com/curation-center/www
Site: https://curation.center/
Peer Query: https://www.peerquery.com/project/BHD_rMxff
Chat: https://discord.gg/xeSnGc8

We need your support!

We do appreciate your support in the form of votes, but we need another form of support: engagement! Please consider joining our chat, adopting Curator or contributing to the development.
Thank you.

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Published on Peer Query - Blockchain-powered p2p collaboration.