(Disclaimer: I tried it on Linux and Mac OSX using perlbrew-ed Perl 5.18.1, I don't know if this will work on Windows or not.) The README indicates that is works on Win32 as well.

MetaCPAN has two main parts:

1. The back-end that collects and processes all the data and provides and API.
2. The front end that talks to this API and displays the data.

In this article we'll see how to set up a copy of the front end and how to make a small change to it.

Clone the metacpan-web repository from GitHub.

$ git clone https://github.com/CPAN-API/metacpan-web.git

(Note: If you want to contribute your changes back then you'll probably first want to fork the repository and clone the forked version.)

If you don't have it yet, install cpan-minus. This is not a requirement, but it will make installation of the dependencies easier.

$ cd metacpan-web
$ cpanm --installdeps .

Then check if everything was installed:

$ perl Makefile.PL

One thing I noticed is that cpanm --installdeps . did not upgrade JSON and JSON::XS. I have 2.61 instead of 2.90, and 2.34 instead of 3.01 respectively. So I installed them manually:

$ cpanm JSON
$ cpanm JSON::XS

Run the tests that come with the code:

$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
$ make test

Then following the README launch the web site using

$ plackup -p 5001 -r

This will start a MetaCPAN front end on port 5001 and -r will reload the application whenever a file changes. This is really good during development.

Now you can visit localhost:5001 and voilà, you have your own Meta::CPAN.

Try using it to make sure everything works and that it can connect to the back-end server.

Adding links to Google+

If you "connect" a web page with your Google+ account, Google will display your face whenever that page appears in a search on Google itself. This needs two steps, one of them is that each page will link to the Google+ profile of the author with ?rel=author at the end of the URL.

This is what I wanted to add.

After some searching, I found out that the templates of MetaCPAN are in the root subdirectory.

I thought I'd like to add the link to Google+ under the picture of the module author on the right-hand side. (See for example SVG, one of the modules I currently maintain.)

I found out that this part of the pages is included from the root/inc/author-pic.html. As the rest of the site, this is also using Template Toolkit.

Ever user of MetaCPAN has a profile, and in that profile they can list their IDs on various other sites. Each such other site has a name and an ID string. Basically a key-value pair. The key for Google+ is googleplus and thus I added the following entry:

<% IF p.name == "googleplus" %>
  <a rel="author" href="<% profiles.${p.name}.url.replace('%s', p.id) %>?rel=author" target="_blank" title="<% p.name %> - <% p.id%>">
    <img src="/static/images/profile/<% p.name %>.png" width=16 height=16 alt="<% p.name %>">
  </a>
<% END %>

This Template Toolkit code means that when the profile name is "googleplus" add a link with an img.

The snippet was based on the code in the root/author.html file that displays lots of profile-icons on the left-hand side of the individual author pages. At least for people who added the profiles to their MetaCPAN account.

Linking from Google+ to MetaCPAN

The other side of the "connection" was described in my post calling the CPAN authors to connect their Google+ pages to MetaCPAN.

Conclusion

It is very easy to set up a local version of the MetaCPAN front-end and to start making changes to it. Go ahead, make some changes, send a pull request and see your name appear among the contributors.

There are currently 85 contributors.

My objective is to make it in the first 3 rows before the end of the year. Can you stop me from reaching that?

ps

At first I had to count the number of contributors manually, but then I checked the source code of that page. It is located in root/about/contributors.html and it is using JQuery with an Ajax call. So I added two lines to also display the total number of contributors. Even if it is not accepted by the maintainers of MetaCPAN, I can now check the number on my own copy of the MetaCPAN site.

I really enjoy the fact that I can change MetaCPAN so easily.